Ask any customer at any point what they want, and they will tell you exactly what they want. And while they’re always right, you shouldn’t listen to them.
Your customer has a very specific context: themselves. Sure, that customer may tell you that they work in technology or even that they’re a product manager at their company. It will be tempting to write down the story exactly as they tell it to you and put it in your backlog, but you should resist the urge.
As a good product manager, part of your job is to understand a few key contexts: the company’s goals/mission, your team’s strengths and weaknesses, the abilities of the technology available to you, and your customer’s problems.
If your interviews are anything like mine, you probably hear a lot about your customer’s solutions to their problems at first. This can be extremely valuable for your knowledge, but building your product from their work-arounds is short-sighted.
Your customer is missing the things that make you a good product manager: wider context about your entire product. They probably don’t know the five-year goal of your company. They don’t know about the conversation you just had with your team. They don’t know that you’ve got a great designer starting on Monday.
Good product managers know that interviewing your customers is a basic requirement. (And there are lots of opinions on the Internet about interviewing your customers, this piece included.) But what’s the point if you’re not supposed to listen to them in the first place?
Maybe you’re asking the wrong questions. From Product Talk:
Instead of asking, “What matters to you when buying a pair of jeans?”, start with, “Tell me about the last time you bought a pair of jeans.”
Instead of asking, “How often do you go to the gym?”, ask, “How many times did you go to the gym last week?”
You can follow up both with a question like, “Is that typical?” This can help surface if the last time was unusual. If it was, ask about other instances.
It feels counter-intuitive, but it’s actually a great way to start down the Five Whys path.
Asking these kinds of better questions gives you the piece that you’re missing from your context map and will help you better understand the people that are using your product.