Front-line insight is your strategic foundation

Strategy starts in the field. It’s the reason we consider intelligence gathering to be the ‘planting season’ for product teams.

As much as teams want to believe they understand their users, we’ve learned the hard way that most don’t. Not deeply. Not enough to confidently anchor a product vision to reality. What passes for “customer insight” in most orgs is often stale, filtered through layers of internal opinion, or just plain fabricated to fit a roadmap someone already committed to. Empathy exercises that lack actual engagement with the target user audience often result in speculation and incorrect assumptions.

We see this all the time—great people and teams making big bets on brittle assumptions. It’s not bad intent. It’s a lack of prioritizing engagement and proximity early in the process.

Insight isn’t a research task. It’s a relationship.

The job of gathering intelligence isn’t just to check a box or fill a slide. It’s to build bridges. The most strategic thing you can do is develop meaningful relationships with your users, especially the sharpest, most curious, and most creative ones. These people become your product’s early signalers, co-designers, and ultimate champions.

It’s not about running a survey. It’s about listening long enough that you start hearing what’s not being said. And it’s about getting close enough to the work that you can see the shortcuts, workarounds, and shadow systems your roadmap will eventually collide with.

Every insight sharpens the vision

We often talk about “vision” as this top-down, executive concept. However, the truth is that the sharpest visions are co-developed in conversation with the people doing the work, your frontline users, and your delivery team.

When we build that feedback loop into the earliest phases of strategy, the fog starts to clear fast. Priorities come into focus. Conflicting assumptions get exposed early. The product begins to take shape in response to what’s actually needed, not what looks good on a pitch deck.

We’ve seen this approach reshape entire programs, such as helping Optum reduce billing confusion by surfacing pain points in real patient conversations, or embedding alongside the Port of LA’s operations team to understand the real-world friction drivers for logistics workers.

Those are the conversations that sharpen vision into strategy. And the strategy? That’s where execution gets its power.

👇 What’s next

In Part 2 of this series, we’ll unpack why product milestones should act like value-prop “lighthouses,” not just dates on a calendar—and how that shift builds strategic clarity across every function.