How well do you know your products?

Hi there! :)

I'm at my first PH launch today, and stumbled upon a question I thought could have been interesting to share. I'm sorry in advance if this sounds like a noob question to product experts, but that's exactly what I currently am :D

So my company just launched Bench for Claude Code here: it's an observability tool that logs, stores, and lets you share everything your Claude Code instances do.

We built it for two specific reasons: catching unwanted side effects, reviewing agent actions and attaching full session context to PRs. Solid use cases - or at least I was hoping so.

While prepping the launch itself, I had Bench running in the background without really thinking about it. A few hours later, a colleague and I disagreed on which draft direction to go with. Turned out the version we both preferred had come up during an earlier brainstorm with Claude Code, and was long gone from the conversation.

I opened Bench, found it in seconds. Done.

It's such a simple thing, but it made me realize: we were so close to our own product that we missed one of its most basic use cases. Not some edge case either. Just... the one that happened to save us that afternoon.

As more product-savy people than me, how do you usually approach this? Is there a more formal research process that could have helped in this case? There's something humbling about discovering your product's value through actually using it, not through frameworks or positioning docs, but by stumbling into a moment where it just quietly mattered. It was in front to my eyes for so long, yet I didn't realize this because I was too focused on what I wanted the product to really be