Part One: Strategy · Deciding what to build
Numbers are cheap and cover everyone, and people will gladly describe their work. Watching is slow and covers a few, and only watching shows the workaround nobody mentions.
Ask a dispatcher how she assigns the day's jobs and she will give you the official version: open the schedule, pick a driver, confirm. Sit beside her for an hour and you see the rest. There are sticky notes on the edge of the monitor. There is a second spreadsheet, kept "just in case." There is a photo on her phone of a whiteboard in the depot.
She did not mention any of it, and she was not hiding it. She stopped seeing it years ago. Each of those things is a place where the product failed and somebody mended it with paper. They are the best feature requests you will ever get, and they never arrive as requests, because nobody asks for help with a problem they have already solved badly.
Watching is slow, a little awkward, and covers a handful of people. Numbers are cheap and cover everyone, which is why they take its place. But numbers show where people click. They never show the sticky note. You need to be in the room, or at least on the shared screen, while the real work is done with real material.
Intuit did this from its early days. Staff asked people who had just bought Quicken whether they could follow them home and watch them set it up. The practice was called Follow Me Home, and what they saw on kitchen tables changed the product.
Therefore:
Go and watch people do the work where they do it, with their own material. Say little, and treat every workaround you see, the paper, the second spreadsheet, as the product's unfinished business.
In practice. Ask one customer this week if you can watch them do the task for half an hour. Write down everything they touch that is not your product.
Goes with. The workarounds usually sit at the edges of THE WHOLE JOB (7), and many are repairs: FIX WHAT'S THERE FIRST (25). Watching people use your own screens is a different exercise, WATCH SOMEONE USE IT (59).
Source: Scott Cook, Intuit's co-founder, has described Follow Me Home in many interviews and company histories.