Post by Mohammad Dayem A.

I spent 6 months at the University of Notre Dame doing nothing but listening. 85+ customer discovery interviews. Sitting across from people — sometimes on Zoom, sometimes in person — asking them what was broken, what was frustrating, what they wished existed. I wasn't selling anything. I was just trying to understand what people actually needed versus what they said they needed. Those are not the same thing. Not even close. A founder would tell me "I need better project management software." What he actually needed was for his three-person team to stop losing client deliverables in email threads. A VP would say "we need to improve our onboarding." What she actually meant was that new hires were productive by week 8 and she needed that to be week 3. The gap between what someone asks for and what they actually need — that's where the real work lives. I've carried that into everything since. When I ran delivery at NettaWorks, we stopped taking client briefs at face value. We'd ask: "What changes for your business if we build this? What happens if we don't?" Half the time, the real priority wasn't even in the original scope. That instinct never left. Before we scope a project, before we quote a number, we dig into the actual problem. Not the symptom. Product management taught me to build for what people need. Customer discovery taught me that people can't always tell you what that is. Your job is to figure it out anyway.