I've been lately on a trip to some of our customer sites. They are using one of our company products, which they have licenses on. They are activating in the healthcare domain.
It was a fulfilling experience - discussing with various employees, to see how they're using the systems, to listen to their feedback.
It's also an opportunity to discuss with them and learn more about their business, to understand their problems and how to incorporate new solutions into our products.
It also helped me understand just how important is to have a good, productive, honest, hands on and face to face communication at the customer site. The feedback you receive that way is invaluable.
No matter what you might think about you knowing the customer domain - it's a really different experience to discuss and see the customer business hands on.
Personally - I think these kind of experiences have helped me understand much better the domain, the use-cases and they also helped me figure out what our next moves - in developing our products - might be.
