Why Listening to Customers Isn’t Enough to Build Great Products — with Yan Grinshtein

In this episode, Yan Grinshtein walks us through his journey from design leader to founder, and the problems in product development that led him to build Nsight Yan shares how a frustrating experience in a fast-paced startup exposed how siloed data and anecdotal decision-making derail product strategy. The conversation dives deep into how Nsight unifies cross-functional data to align company priorities, improve product direction, and prevent missteps caused by isolated feedback or founder instinct.

About Yan Grinshtein:

Yan Grinshtein is a veteran designer and product leader with over 20 years of experience crafting successful products, leading high-performing teams, and collaborating with global brands like Microsoft, Volkswagen, Taboola, and Sony BMG. After a long career spanning agency, freelance, and startup environments, he’s now on sabbatical from hands-on design to build Nsight—a company focused on helping design and product teams overcome decision-making bottlenecks, align priorities, and access the holistic data they need to do their best work.

Here is what we cover:

● Origin of Nsight: Born from Yan’s experience with chaotic roadmap planning in a hyper-growth startup.
● Customer Feedback ≠ Solution: Product teams must identify underlying problems, not just build what customers ask for.
● Unified Data Strategy: Nsight pulls from tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, and support tickets to triangulate real customer needs.
● Misaligned Roles: Design is too often disconnected from business strategy, treated like a service agency.
● Trend-Based Prioritization: Product decisions should be driven by overlapping signals from market trends, user research, and internal data.
● Fast Validation: Use low-fidelity prototypes to validate ideas quickly—don’t waste time building before learning.
● Avoid Loudest Voice Wins: Relying on visionary instinct without data leads to flawed decisions.
● Underpromise, Overdeliver: Always pad timelines; product work is unpredictable.
● Centralized Intelligence: Nsight’s mission is to eliminate data silos and help teams act on actionable, validated intelligence.
● Industry-Wide Challenge: Billions of hours are wasted searching for information—Nsight aims to fix that.