LILIYO: Little Is Learned In Your Office

Product managers are busy. Meetings, roadmap reviews, backlog grooming, stakeholder updates, status decks. By five o'clock, most product managers feel like they've put in a full day of real work.

But… how much of that work actually taught you anything new about your customers?

For most people, the honest answer is none of it.

The problem with office work

Office work feels productive because it's measurable. You can point to a roadmap you updated, a meeting you ran, a document you shipped. Customer understanding doesn't work that way. It doesn't show up as a line item on your calendar, and it rarely arrives on schedule. So it's easy to fill every hour with the visible, trackable work of the office and quietly let customer understanding go stale.

The trouble is, none of that office work generates new insight. It processes insight you already have. Roadmaps get reprioritized based on the same assumptions. Documents get refined based on the same internal opinions. Meetings debate the same secondhand anecdotes from sales and support. You can spend an entire quarter being busy without learning a single new thing about the people who buy your product.

Where I first heard this

Early in my career, I sold for a general manager named Mr. Yamaguchi, who had a habit of dropping maxims that sounded wise and took a while to land. One of them was simply: "Remember, NIHITO."

I assumed it was Japanese. He laughed and told me it was American — he'd picked it up after moving to the U.S., and I'd just never run into it. NIHITO, he explained, stands for “Nothing Important Happens In The Office.”

For a sales team, that one lands immediately. Customers aren't sitting in your cubicle waiting to be discovered. Deals don't close in your conference room. If you're at your desk, you might feel busy, but you're not doing the job you were hired to do.

Years later, I shared the story with colleagues at Pragmatic, and "NIHITO visits" became shorthand for getting out of the building to see customers in person. It stuck. It started showing up in other people's slides and webinars, which is usually a sign a phrase has earned its keep.

Why product management needs its own version

Product managers don't have the same excuse salespeople do. You do have legitimate work to do at your desk — writing product briefs, defining acceptance criteria, setting priorities. NIHITO doesn't quite fit, because plenty of important things do happen in a product manager's office.

But almost none of it is customer learning. So the acronym product management actually needs is a notch less absolute:

Customers don't work in your office, and they certainly don't work in your home office. They experience your product in the middle of their actual jobs, where shortcuts exist for a reason and "that's just how we do it" is usually hiding a piece of friction nobody's bothered to name. You can be the smartest product manager in the building, and it won't matter, because nothing important about your customers happens in that building.

The trap of secondhand insight

The comfortable alternative to leaving the office is assuming that sales and support are already bringing you the customer's voice. Sometimes they are. More often, you're getting the version of the story that was easiest to relay in a Slack message — the loudest complaint, the most recent deal, the anecdote that happened to reach you. That's not the same as hearing it yourself, and it's definitely not the same as being able to ask the follow-up question that would have changed your interpretation entirely.

It’s the difference between reading about a kiss and actually getting a kiss from a loved one.

Secondhand insight also tends to confirm whatever you already believe, because it's been filtered through someone else's assumptions before it ever reaches you. Direct conversations are the only reliable way to discover what you've been missing instead of what you expected to hear.

What to do next

Pick one customer or prospect this week and get an actual conversation on the calendar — not a survey—a real conversation where you're asking about their decisions, their workarounds, and where they hesitated. Then do it again next week. And the week after that.

If you want sharper priorities, a stronger strategy, and more credibility the next time you're in the room with leadership, it won't come from a better-organized roadmap. It'll come from spending less time in the office and more time finding out what you've been missing.

Excerpt from Customer Conversations: A Product Manager’s Superpower.