You say that these numbers mean dial it down. I say they mean dial it up. You haven't gotten through. There are people you haven't persuaded yet. These number mean dial it up. Otherwise you're like the French radical, watching the crowd run by and saying, "There go my people. I must find out where they're going so I can lead them."

I ran into a great post from Karri of Linear on product management. Most of what he says warrants further discussion and digestion, but I wanted to chime in on the rhetorical question which prompted his lovely response:

Consider this: if “talk to customers” is the biggest secret to product success, then why aren’t more products successful? Why are so many founders unsuccessful? What explains PMs who’ve been talking to customers 5 times a week for years, without ever making products that win?

"Talk to customers" has become, to me, the same kind of truism as "charge more" and "users don't care about your codebase" — easy to deploy and sound clever in doing so, but dangerous in their banality.

At risk of deploying a metaphor (c.f. The taste of beer), customer feedback is something like a GPS: faster than driving aimlessly, slower than knowing the streets like the back of your hand. Especially in commodity/parity-style industries (like product management tools in Karri's case, or email in mine) customers make for good historians but poor futurists, and certainly they won't do the hardest and most important job of identifying your leverage points for you.

None of this is to say you shouldn't talk to customers: you should! But it should be neither the first nor the last step in your process: if someone needs to talk with people to figure out what to build next, it means they have insufficient vision; if someone needs to talk with people to figure out if something is truly ready for GA it means your org has insufficient conviction and process.

Customers are great at informing a product: reminding you of edge cases, blind spots, prior art, and so on. But there are many incredible things that can be built without information, and the annals of history are swamped with products that had very well-informed backlogs and yet no leverage or power to stop their own demise.