The opinions of contributing entrepreneurs are their own. </p><div>
Key Takeaways
- Through real-world observations and close communication with your customers, you can create solutions that address real needs rather than hypothetical problems.
- Staying close to the workflow and customer experience is a proven tactic for effective problem solving and innovation in business.
Every founder I know has a story about the moment when things finally clicked.
For Airbnb, that moment came when the founders realized their struggling platform didn’t have a business problem, but a customer problem. They quit coding, flew to New York and visited hosts in person. In retrospect, what they discovered wasn’t surprising: Hosts were struggling to photograph their spaces and communicate clearly with guests. So the founders picked up cameras, took better photos and helped hosts tell better stories. Turnover doubled in one month.
That story has always stuck with me – not because it is about hospitality, but because it is about humility. The moment they stopped guessing and started listening, everything changed.
I recognized that truth because I had seen the same pattern play out in a completely different place. Before founding BuildOps, I worked in construction and real estate development for years, managing large projects, walking construction sites and working shoulder to shoulder with contractors. I saw how much of the economy depends on their work. But when I started running projects myself, I also saw how far most technology had strayed from the reality of the field.
These were not small operations. Many earned tens of millions of dollars a year to keep hospitals running, schools open and power flowing to critical facilities. Yet they coordinated it all through text messages, spreadsheets and outdated software. Dispatchers were constantly switching calls while technicians waited for updates. Invoices were lagging behind for weeks. Critical data was located in six tools that did not communicate with each other.
That gap between the importance of the work and the limits of the tools was the spark BuildOps.
The leaders of these companies didn’t ask for flashier technology. They wanted clarity. They wanted systems that allowed them to see their business clearly, communicate faster, and stop wasting time in the noise between teams. So we started where the work happens.
Our team spent time with coordinators, service managers and technicians. We looked at how decisions were made in real time – what created friction, where things slowed down, and what quietly made people’s days harder than they needed to be. Those observations shaped everything that followed.
What we built was not a digital version of the old way. It was an operational backbone designed around the way these companies actually function. Every major decision – product, design and data – came from real conversations with the people doing the work.
That principle has guided us ever since. The closer we are to our customers, the smarter we build. When we test something new, our product leaders talk directly to the people using it. When a feature is released, we’re already thinking about how we can make the next one faster, cleaner, and easier.
It’s a cycle of listening, building and refining that keeps the company grounded.
Related: You Need to Listen More to Lead Better – 5 Tactics for Leaders to Close the Communication Gap with Their Team
Proximity changes what you see
Too many startups build remotely. They design for investors instead of customers. They chase nail polish before they solve pain.
But to build something sustainable you need what Airbnb discovered in 2009 and what I rediscovered in construction years later: proximity.
Proximity shows what data alone cannot do. You can stare at dashboards all day and still miss the moments that define a customer’s experience: the phone call that comes in five minutes late, the approval that blocks an entire team, the silent frustration that never makes it into a report.
When you’re close enough to see those things, you stop building for a persona and start building for a person.
At BuildOps, that belief is ingrained in the way we work. Customer feedback isn’t filtered through layers of abstraction before it reaches the people who can act on it. Our product and engineering leaders talk directly to contractors every week – not through decks or summaries, but through real conversations about what slows them down and what would make their day easier.
Some of our most impactful features – like enabling technicians to capture asset data in seconds or giving dispatchers a clear view of every open call – came from those moments. Not from analytical dashboards, but from lived experience.
Related: Your Customers Are Talking About You: Here’s How to Turn Their Feedback into Profit
From listening to action
Proximity only matters if behavior changes. Over time, I’ve learned that most leaders don’t fail because they don’t care about customers. They fail because their feedback loops are too abstract.
If you’re building or running a business and want to apply this idea in a practical way, start here:
Replace assumptions with observation.
Choose a role closest to the work (support, operations, execution) and spend time watching how decisions are actually made. Not in a meeting. In real conditions. You will learn more in a few hours than after weeks of reporting.
Follow one problem from start to finish.
Most organizations discuss problems in fragments: a ticket, a statistic, a complaint. Instead, trace a single problem from start to finish. Where did it start? Who touched it? Where did it get stuck? The real insight usually lives between transfers.
Shorten the distance between feedback and action.
If customer input has to climb a ladder of abstracts before it reaches someone who can do something about it, it loses its urgency. The people building the solution need to hear the problem directly.
Fix what makes someone’s day harder, not what looks impressive.
The most valuable improvements are rarely flashy. It’s the small changes that remove friction: fewer steps, clearer transfers, better visibility at the right moment. Those are the things that people feel immediately.
None of this requires a reorganization or a new strategy. It requires presence.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that great companies don’t start with grand visions. They start with problems you can feel: real pain, experienced up close. You cannot analyze the path to that kind of understanding. You have to see it, touch it and experience it.
Because the companies that last are not the ones that pursue innovation for its own sake. They are the ones close enough to the pain to build something real.