Stop Guessing: Why Product Leaders Must Get Into the Market

By Phil Faust, Founder at Faust Forward

Too often, product strategy meetings happen in boardrooms far removed from the real world of customers. Teams debate roadmaps, prioritize features, and make bets on market direction based on assumptions, second-hand input, or internal politics. But there’s a fundamental truth in great product management: you can't build what the market wants if you don't deeply understand the market.

At Faust Forward, we emphasize a principle from the Pragmatic Marketing framework that every product leader should live by: NIHITO — Nothing Important Happens In The Office. This isn't just a catchy acronym; it's a call to action. You must get out of your chair and into the world of your users and customers. Observe what they do, understand what they need, and listen to what they say. These insights are not optional; they are the foundation of sound product decisions.

Here’s why this matters:

1. Customers Aren’t a Monolith
Sales teams are focused on individual deals. Their feedback often reflects the loudest or most immediate customer, not the broader market. While sales input is valuable, it should be balanced with a wide-angle view across your entire user base. Product managers must synthesize patterns across many voices, not just echo one.

2. Data Alone Isn’t Enough
Quantitative insights can tell you what is happening, but they rarely tell you why.  It’s also backward-looking. And can only tell you what has happened.  Interviews, field visits, and direct observation unlock the motivations and context behind the numbers. Combining qualitative and quantitative data creates a more robust foundation for decision-making.

3. Proximity Breeds Empathy
It’s easy to dehumanize a persona on a slide. But when you sit across from a customer and see their frustrations, workarounds, and triumphs, it changes how you build. This was never more clear to me than when I was working with a team focused on improving the accessibility of a platform.  We invited the usability expert employed by one of our largest buying groups, along with her service dog, Lola, to walk through our products.  Just a few short minutes into navigating our platform (with our engineering team), the shift in understanding of the user challenges and the work we had to do was crystal clear.  The platform's usability increased tremendously in the following weeks.  Real conversations shift product priorities in ways dashboards never can.

4. Better Strategy, Not Just Better Features
Understanding the market directly helps you identify emerging needs, latent pain points, and opportunities your competitors might miss. Seeing what your users are doing before and after engaging with your product can expose tremendous opportunities.  It feeds strategic thinking, not just tactical planning.

Getting Started

• Attend sales and customer success calls and visits on a regular basis.

• Spend time observing users in their environment.

• Establish a user group.

• Run continuous discovery interviews.

• Map qualitative insights to quantitative patterns.

• Involve cross-functional stakeholders in user research.

The most successful products aren't built by those with the best guesses. They're built by those closest to their customers. Get out of the office. Get into the market. And never forget: NOHITO.

At Faust Forward, we help organizations build market-backed strategies and product practices that scale. If your team needs help getting closer to your customers, let's talk.