The moment you start building a solution to a problem for someone else, you cease to be the customer. It's a fundamental shift in your reality, not simply a change in perspective. As you become the vendor, your expertise the led you to build a solution in the first place becomes a double-edged sword - even if you originally built the solution for yourself. You've crossed a threshold with no turning back.

Building is a One-Way Door

Your understanding of the problem is now influenced by your knowledge of the solution (known as "The Curse of Knowledge". You're seeing the world through your own lens, not your customers', and you can't really recall how you used to see it. This distortion is permanent. To break out, you must acknowledge the unbridgeable mental gap between you and your customers. This means recognizing that your own biases and assumptions are no longer sufficient to guide your decision-making. It can be a tough pill to swallow.

So, how do you move forward? Your goal remains the same: build something people want, and effectively communicate its value to them.

Cultivating a Theory of Mind

To build something people want, and to effectively market, message, and sell it to them, you need clarity on their desires, backgrounds, and motivations. This requires developing a theory of mind – understanding their thoughts and feelings in real-time and projecting that into the future. It's about simulating their mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions, and then critically, validating (or invalidating) those with hard evidence.

You're not a mind-reader, but an observer of human behavior, seeking to grasp underlying drivers. By seeing your customers' behavior, listening to their feedback (and bringing healthy skepticism of its validity), you can develop a more nuanced understanding of their needs, beyond what they merely say.
This is true not just for product development, but for every aspect of your business that touches the customer, including marketing, messaging, and sales.

No matter how much experience you had in your customers' shoes in the past, you are no longer an accurate historian. Your perspective has been altered by your new role, and you need to adapt to this new reality. By cultivating theory of mind, you can ensure that your marketing, messaging, and sales efforts are aligned with your customers' needs, and that you're not relying on assumptions or biases that drift ever more out of date.

This principle is at the heart of Amazon's "Customer Obsessed" culture, contributing to their success in so many diverse and often hyper-competetive markets.

With a well-developed theory of mind, you'll build a mental system that lets you truly understand your customers, laying the foundation for an upward spiral.