The customer owns the problem and you react to that
When you go fly fishing the idea is to try to match your “fly” (the bait you use) to whatever the fish is currently eating. Throughout the day what the fish eats changes - if there’s a caddis hatch, they’ll eat those for a bit. If it’s windy and hoppers are falling into the water from the tall grass along the shore, they’ll lock in on those.
This is frustrating because there are about 200 other food options at any given moment. Unless you’ve been fishing that exact stretch of water for years, you not only have to try a bunch of stuff before you get the right match - the right type, size, color - you also have to cast that fly perfectly so the fish doesn’t see any variation between it and the real version they just ate.
You can throw a big, juicy grasshopper right over the nose of a trout 200 times - if it’s currently eating something else, even if that thing is way smaller and will provide fewer calories - it isn’t going to give your hopper a second glance. It doesn’t matter how many times my dad yells “eat the damn hopper, you dumb fish!”
This is the best and worst part of fly fishing. The physical skill part (casting) is tricky, but it’s irrelevant if you’ve got the wrong bait. You have to be reactive to the reality of the fish. The hardest part of being a fly fisherman is accepting this - the whole thing is a big puzzle and the fish has all the answers. Try lots of stuff, change quickly, acknowledge that you can’t force something to work.
It’s very likely that you’re a better judge of what’s good for your customer than they are. Humans are really good at judgement and horrific at self-reflection. If you invite a total stranger to look over your shoulder for a day they’ll notice like 20 ridiculously silly things you do that you haven’t noticed and should immediately change. I actually think that’d be an incredible service (that no one would use) - someone just watches you do everything for a week, logs it all, then shows it to you with (or without) suggestions.
But, when you’re building a product, you can’t tell them to see a problem the way you think they should. They own the problem. Your job is to pattern match - find out exactly how they solve the problem now, where they get stuck, and what could help them get past that dam in the river.
This should technically be easier with AI, since it’ll be way faster and cheaper to iterate on products so that they can match what our customer needs (switching flies). But it’s also harder, because once you get something built you’ll fall in love with it and not want to change. You’ll be my Dad, yelling at your customers “use the damn recipe app, you dummy!”
They own the problem, you react.