Clients rarely ask for a product. They ask for a fix to something that keeps hurting. But the shape of that recurring hurt is frequently the outline of a product no one has drawn yet.
Listen for the workaround
The clearest signal is the workaround people have quietly built to survive the bottleneck — the spreadsheet, the ritual, the one person who "just knows." A durable workaround is a feature request in disguise.
When you find yourself rebuilding the same workaround for different clients, the product has already introduced itself.
From one fix to a repeatable one
The move is to solve the specific instance well, then ask what would have to be true to solve it for the next ten teams without starting over. That question turns a fix into a direction.
Not every bottleneck hides a product. But the ones that recur, across clients, in the same shape almost always do.
