"How can my company become great at design?" Founders ask me this question more than any other. They're often considering hiring a hotshot designer or an expensive design agency. And while those might help, neither will bake design deep into how the company operates. Founders need a way to make great design become automatic, and there's only one way I've found to do that reliably: invest time in listening to your customers.

You've probably heard this advice a hundred times before. Whether you call it "user research" or "customer development" or just "getting out of the building", we all know that hearing directly from customers is one of the fastest ways to learn and improve our products. But when I ask founders how long it's been since they've watched a real customer (not a family member) use their product, they usually look embarrassed and admit they haven't tested anything in months.

It's so much fun to make things that it's often hard to stop and listen. I'll admit it — even though I know user research is valuable, I've argued against it on many projects. I've made one excuse after another to avoid talking with customers, because I'd much rather be building. Luckily, I work with talented and stubborn people who have proven me wrong over and over again. So here are some of the dumb excuses I've made, and how I coach myself out of making the same mistakes again:

Excuse: Customers don't know what they want.

I'm sure you've heard the famous Ford quote, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." So what? No one expects customers to design the product for you. That'd be way too easy! But customers can absolutely tell you their goals and frustrations. Customers can show you what they like or dislike about products and you can watch when they get stuck or confused. So if customers say they want faster horses, what you should hear is that getting around is too slow. It's the team's job to take all that raw input and build products to delight customers.