Make a difference (1/4): direct access to users and customers

This really should be obvious. Product teams cannot solve value and usability issues without direct access to actual customers and users.  

In addition to providing inspiration for unsolved problems, customers and users help us test proposed solutions quickly. Users can directly engage with the product and provide feedback about their experience.

Providing direct access to users and customers is intuitively obvious for your product manager and designer, but providing it to your engineers is less obvious.  

There's no need for all your engineers to attend every customer or user interaction. However, when an engineer notices a user struggling, "the magic happens" and he becomes committed to resolving the issue. So you should encourage and facilitate this as much as you can.

Don't let anyone prevent you from getting direct access to customers. No salesperson or marketing person, no customer success specialist, no user researcher, no Agile Coach, no vendor manager. No one.