Try Walking in Their Shoes

"But before you come to any conclusions, try walking in my shoes" Walking In My Shoes, Depeche Mode

You think you know your audience. Their pains, their pressures, the stress they carry at work. You've been at this a while.

But you don't.

Based on your own experience, you can make educated guesses about your users. But you don't actually know which message will resonate, which copy will hit, or which promise will land on the right nerve.

This matters. Because if you can pinpoint the real issue and speak to what users genuinely need, you have a product worth buying. If you're guessing, you're hoping.

The most direct way to close that gap: talk to them. Hear about their day in their own words. Show real empathy. Ask about the pain, and what a better outcome would look like for them.

That's not always possible. And sometimes you don't have users yet.

In those cases, imagination is a real tool, but it needs direction. Build a picture of your ideal user. What does their day look like? What are they dealing with at work, with their team, with their tools? What slows them down? Empathize with the whole picture, not just the feature-level problem.

It will never be perfect. But it gives you something a template-built persona never can: a human.

People are people :)