There's a problem with customer feedback that has nothing to do with bad research. It's quite simply this: Your customers chose you. Obvious, maybe. But we rarely account for what that choice already filtered out. Think about who tends to sit closest to a product team. Current customers. Power users. Advisory-board members. Champions inside key accounts. People willing to join a beta. Customers who take your calls. These are often exactly the people worth talking to. They kno

Market research didn’t start as a department. It started as paying attention. Somebody noticed which version of a product people picked up first.Somebody else caught the hesitation right after a price was mentioned.Then they made a change—and watched what happened next. That was the essence of it: notice, understand, improve. Build something better because you actually saw what people did, not just what they said. As businesses scaled, that proximity disappeared. You couldn’t