Designing Without the User in the Room: A B2B Reality Check

In B2B, you're often designing for someone you'll never meet: an admin using your product between other tasks; a power user buried in a workflow you can only imagine; or a decision-maker who influenced the purchase but never opens the app. Personas can only take you so far when the real user reaches you filtered through secondhand feedback.

A career across Customer Care, QA, and Product Design taught one thing about this gap: "We don't have access to real users" is rarely the full story. Usually, we just haven't looked in the right places yet.

Join for a hands-on exercise: We'll map the indirect signals you likely already have access to, support tickets, sales calls, onboarding drop-off, account manager conversations, and practice using them to pressure-test a real design decision against multiple possible user types.

We'll also talk honestly about where assumptions are unavoidable, and how to design in a way that survives being wrong about them.

You'll leave with a list of indirect research sources you're currently underusing, one concrete way to pressure-test your designs, and a more honest sense of which of your user assumptions are backed by evidence, and which ones you've just been trusting by default.