In my early days as an internet banking (that’s what they called it back then) product manager, I visited the treasury department of a corporate client that managed payments for several companies. Before authorizing anything, the lady running that department would call each company’s accountant and double-check the queued payments against their paper records. While I assisted that day it took her at least 1 hour to do that, for 4 or 5 companies. Our internet banking app didn’t allow her to filter payments by company, so if enough payments piled up, she risked missing the cut-off time with this reconciliation. She’d been telling us, loudly and repeatedly, that the app was useless and that we needed to extend processing hours, which we couldn’t do.
The first time you watch a customer use your product in their own space, you’ll notice things you’ve never seen before. Maybe it’s the way they bypass a feature you thought was essential. Or how they keep a scrap of paper nearby to jot down something your product already should have embedded. Or the slight pause they take before pressing a button, because they’re not sure what will happen next. These moments rarely show up in surveys or reports. They live in the real world, the one your product has to survive in.
That’s exactly what happened on a visit that changed everything for me. The treasurer who’d been telling us she needed longer processing hours didn’t actually need them. What she needed was a way to decide faster. A simple filter by company would save her from frantic calls and missed deadlines.
Sometimes you only discover this by being there. Other times, customers tell you what they think you’d like to hear, a mix of politeness and genuine belief. They say they’d pay more for sustainable packaging, but choose the cheaper option when the choice is in front of them. They say they’d use a feature daily, but abandon it after a week. Behavioral scientists call this the intention–behavior gap, the same pattern Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely, and others have documented for decades(1). It’s not dishonesty. It’s the human gap between intention and action, the same gap that makes us buy gym memberships in January and skip workouts by March.
If you only collect what customers say, you get a distorted picture. If you only look at usage data, you miss the story behind the behavior. The real insight comes from seeing the two side by side, the stated need and the lived reality. That’s why field time matters so much. You don’t go into the field to confirm your assumptions; you go to see what your dashboards can’t tell you. Watch a few customers in their own environment, shadow a support call, or run a short “show me” session where they use the product and talk through what they’re doing. You’ll see workarounds, hesitations, and micro-decisions your “user journey” diagrams never captured, and hear the small frustrations they’ve long since adapted to.
And once you’ve seen those moments up close, it changes the way you think about your product entirely. Spending a day in the field is humbling. You realise how much of your product’s world happens outside your control: the environment, the tools people pair it with, the constraints you never considered. You see where your elegant design collides with messy reality. And you come back with raw, tangible material for making decisions, not just numbers and quotes, but lived evidence.
There will be stretches when you can’t be out there: travel budgets get cut, customer sites are off-limits, or you’re simply buried in delivery work. In those periods, your sales force and customer support team become your eyes and ears. Lean on them. Sit in on a couple of support calls each week, or join a sales demo to hear the questions prospects actually ask. Ask these teams to flag unusual feedback or recurring themes, and record short snippets from their interactions for you to review. Make it easy for them to pass this along: a shared document, a Teams group, even a quick weekly check-in where they can drop what they’ve heard. It’s not the same as being face-to-face with customers, but it keeps you plugged into the real conversations happening on the front lines. The real danger comes when talk inside the company drifts away from the reality your product has to live in. Even a thin, imperfect thread of contact is better than silence. And when you can get back into the field, you’ll have a running start instead of starting from zero.
The job of a product manager goes beyond making customers live up to what they said they wanted. It means understanding how they actually behave and building for that. Henry Ford is often credited, though historians debate the accuracy, with saying, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Steve Jobs put it more sharply: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” The attribution may be fuzzy, but the point stands: customers rarely articulate their real needs. Sometimes the role calls for adjusting the product to meet them where they are. Other times it calls for reframing the value so it matches what they truly care about. In both cases, the only way to bridge that gap comes from looking beyond the spreadsheet and spending time in their world.
You won’t always like what you find. Yet those moments of truth are what sharpen your judgment and keep your product anchored in reality. So get out of the ivory tower. Go into the field. Watch people use what you’ve built. Leave the marketing-research-deck-with-animated-transitions behind (you already know I hate slides)!
Further reading:
(1) If you want to dig deeper into why what people say and what they do often diverge, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow are both excellent starting points.
Florin Branici 
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