Stauch: Product teams must embed directly with customers, not rely on 30-minute interviews
Jake Stauch · Go hard early: How lessons from Verkada shaped this AI-native IT platform | Jake Stauch (Serval) · Oct 23, 2025 · at 1:01:31
Jake Stauch, founder and CEO of Serval and former product leader at Verkada, discusses how product teams should cultivate deep customer empathy to make better product decisions.
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“You have to be embedded with a customer and it's not, oh, I'm going to schedule a customer interview and I'm going to have an engineer talk to a customer for 30 minutes because we're doing a customer interview and they've got a list of questions they're going to answer. It's more, you have to be in a Slack channel with a customer. You have to have a weekly call with a customer. The customer should be texting you when they run into problems. Like you really just have to embed yourself in the lives of these customers for you to understand them at that level. And there's no substitute for it.”
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