The further you are from your customers, the harder it is to create something they’ll love. It’s not just about missing the mark on features or functionality. It’s about solving problems that don’t exist and overlooking the ones that do.

Ironically, the tools we’ve built to understand customers often increase that distance. Personas, journey maps, reports—they make the user feel like a concept, not a real person. These artifacts give you just enough information to feel informed, but not enough to truly care.

And caring is everything.

Empathy can’t be outsourced

Let’s stop pretending that user research reports create empathy. They don’t. They create knowledge. They’re useful, but they don’t light the fire. Real empathy comes from firsthand experience. When you’ve lived through a customer’s frustrations, joys, and routines, you don’t need a report to tell you what matters. You already know.

Think about the last time you truly understood someone’s problem. Did it happen because you read a summary? Or was it because you stood in their shoes long enough to feel what they feel?

Stop analyzing. Start living.

Here’s the simplest way to get closer to your customers: live their lives. Do their job. Use your product as they use it. Experience the limitations, the workarounds, and the little moments of joy.

If you build software for customer service reps, spend a week answering support calls. If you make tools for delivery drivers, spend a week behind the wheel. Don’t just observe—participate.

This isn’t about doing research. It’s about getting perspective. When you live like your customer, you stop solving problems from the outside and start solving them from within.

Why we avoid the obvious

If immersion is so powerful, why do so many teams avoid it? Because it’s hard. It takes time. It forces you to step out of your comfort zone. And it can feel too simple—almost naive.

It’s easier to run a survey or commission a research project. Those things feel official. They produce outputs you can share: a slide deck, a diagram, a roadmap. Living like your customer, on the other hand, produces no deliverable. Just deeper insight and better instincts.

The difference between knowing and feeling

When I hear leaders- especially executives- talk about “getting closer to the customer,” I often see a pattern. They know their customer in theory, but they don’t feel their customer in practice.

And that gap matters. It’s the difference between guessing at what might work and intuitively understanding what will. Reports don’t fill that gap. Experience does.

Make it part of the job

Living like your customer shouldn’t be a one-off activity. It should be part of the job.

At Canvas of Colors, we’re always experimenting with methods to stay as close to the customer as possible. That might mean answering support emails, joining sales calls, or shadowing users. The goal isn’t to gather data—it’s to stay grounded.

When you make immersion a habit, something magical happens. You stop designing for users and start designing with them in mind. You don’t need personas or reports to remind you what matters. You’ve felt it.

Build what you’d want

The best products come from creators who understand their customers deeply—sometimes because they are their customers. They’re solving a problem they’ve felt, so they know exactly what to build.

But even if you’re not scratching your own itch, you can still get close enough to care. Live like your customers. Feel what they feel. And then bring that experience back to your work.

Understanding your customers isn’t about process or artifacts. It’s about proximity. So stop researching and start living. You’ll build better products—and you’ll care more about the people you’re building for.