product
Association
When experiencing a product, the experience is not just the product. Its also about the association that you make with the product. Its about the feeling of familiarity that comes for free with it. The stronger the association with that feeling, the more incapable you would be of actually having an unbiased opinion about it. One example that comes to my mind is when I ordered a fancy soap bar after reading its description - it smells like sweet vanilla and orange
. In this case its not only about liking the smell of the soap, its also about the association that you would make with the smell. The moment I started using the soap, it reminded me of a detergent used to wash clothes in India. So it was not the actual product itself but my association of it with something repulsive that ruined the experience for me. If you want a product to be acceptable to a global audience, it becomes important to work with people from a diverse set of backgrounds so that they can make different sets of associations with the same product. It would leave you culturally more informed and prevent you from committing product experience faux pas.
Opinions
If you understand something really well, you will have opinions. If you really care for something, you will have opinions. Having opinions means that you give a damn. By always encouraging people to share their opinion, you are actually caring for them.
Priorities
Do you fix an issue that someone with an important designation in your company found or you fix something that is annoying to the customer? One thing to keep in mind when prioritizing is that most of the times that person with an important designation is not even a paying customer.
Anticipation
A lot of responsibility of the Product designer is to anticipate what the users would want before they know that they want it. If you do that, it would enable you to actually build out the feature by the time the users think they need it. You cannot wait until the users start complaining or demanding that feature. Even if your anticipated feature does not work out, that experience by itself would lead to unanticipated discoveries. If you do get it right, your users would thank you. Either ways, its a win-win situation.