The Best Way to Build Your Product is...
stop "studying your users" and start building with them!
There’s a moment where every product manager hits a kind of unsettling déjà vu.
You’ve done the interviews. You’ve dissected the transcripts. You’ve prioritized the insights. And yet, after launch, something still feels… off.
The feature technically solves the problem, but customers aren’t flocking to it the way you expected. Adoption trickles in. Usage looks shallow. You start to hear the dreaded line from the field teams: “It’s good, but it’s not quite what they needed.”
This happens even when teams swear they’re “doing discovery.”
Because in most orgs, discovery is still treated like a ceremonial ritual instead of a continuous, collaborative process. A sprint of interviews before planning. A usability test before launch. And then months of building in the dark.
Discovery is broken not because teams don’t care, but because the process is fundamentally one-sided. We ask questions. Customers answer. Then the door closes, and the real decisions happen without them.
In my experience, I’ve found that the discovery phase is not just the most important part of the product lifecycle, but also the most overlooked. Every program runs a discovery phase, but product teams usually look at discovery phases as tenuous requirements and note-gathering workshops.
When in reality, the discovery phase is so much more. In fact, it might even be the most important phase of a product build; one that sets the tone for the rest of the product journey.
So what’s the solution…?
The future of product work isn’t about running better interviews. It’s about transforming the discovery phase into co-creation.
Continuous Discovery, Rewritten for the Real World
Continuous discovery sounds like a buzzword, but in practice, it’s just a rhythm shift. Instead of treating learning as a “phase,” teams weave it into weekly work. The product trio (PM, designer, engineer) talks to customers together. They test assumptions in small slices. They validate direction before committing engineering time.
This alone changes product quality. Decisions start reflecting what customers actually do right now rather than personas that haven’t been touched since the last rebrand.
But even teams with a strong discovery cadence can fall into a subtle trap:
They learn constantly, but still build alone.
That’s where co-creation enters as the next evolution.
Co-Creation: The PM Skill Most Teams Undervalue
Feedback is reactive. It starts with something you’ve already decided, designed, or defined.
Co-creation is proactive. It invites customers upstream into shaping the problem, ranking opportunities, surfacing edge cases, and influencing the earliest expression of a solution.
In other words, continuous discovery is the operating system.
Co-creation is the collaboration layer that actually unlocks its potential.
This is where PMs become more than facilitators of research.
They become architects of alignment, connecting the product team, the customer reality, and the strategic direction into one shared decision-making loop.
The Co-Creation Loop (A PM’s Actual Job)
Most teams think the magic happens during solution reviews. But the real breakthroughs happen way earlier, in conversations where customers unpack the messy realities of their workflow.
The loop looks something like this:
1. Co-discover the problem
Instead of asking what customers think they want, you watch how they work. You walk through their process step by step. You let them show you hacks they’ve normalized: ten-tab workflows, CSV gymnastics, workaround hierarchies built out of sheer survival.
This isn’t just listening. It’s joint exploration. PMs uncover truths users forgot were even problems.
2. Co-frame the opportunity
From those conversations, you create opportunity statements. But you don’t workshop them alone. You bring a few customers into the framing process and ask, “Which of these would materially change your day if solved?”
Suddenly your roadmap stops being a guessing game. It becomes a reflection of customer urgency, not internal politics.
3. Co-design the solution
Forget the big reveal of high-fi designs. The strongest solutions are born in messy, collaborative, low-fidelity conversations. Rough sketches. Alternative flows. A designer scribbling while a customer talks through tradeoffs. An engineer explaining feasibility constraints in real time.
This isn’t about customers becoming designers. It’s about them validating logic, not aesthetics.
4. Co-test the experience
And when you finally bring an early prototype back to them, the energy is different. They’re not evaluating. They’re recognizing. They’re seeing their fingerprints in the solution.
You’re not asking, “Do you like this?”
You’re asking, “Does this solve what you helped us frame?”
The loop closes with trust, not guesswork.
How You Know It’s Working
The metrics tell you first:
Adoption looks cleaner.
Activation improves.
Time-to-value shrinks.
Retention strengthens because customers recognize the product as an extension of their workflow, not an overlay on top of it.
But the real signal isn’t numerical.
It’s linguistic.
Customers start saying “we.”
“We should improve this flow.”
“We need to fix the onboarding friction.”
“We thought the second step could be tighter.”
Internally, your team stops saying, “Users want…”
They start saying, “Priya struggles with…,” “Marcus loses time when…,” “Chloe’s workaround points to…”
You move from hypothetical personas to real humans shaping real decisions.
That’s the product of co-creation.
The Takeaway
Ultimately, as a PM, your goal is to not just create a product that enables efficiency but a team that enables the product. And a product team becomes unstoppable the moment discovery stops being something they do for customers, and becomes something they build with them.
Co-creation turns feedback into partnership, decisions into shared ownership and solutions into something customers recognize as their own.
When you shift from interviews to alliances, you stop guessing and start compounding on trust, clarity and product momentum. That’s the real unlock for modern PM’s and its the difference between products users tolerate vs products they champion.