The only people worse at knowing what the customer wants than management/sales is the customers themselves.

It's really strange the first time you experience it.

Agree, never ask a user what they want

But you can't go wrong with talking to users to understand the problems they are dealing with

I've heard "The Mom Test" is a good book around that, but I've never read it.

https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/...

It’s great. It strongly warns against ego pitching, aka talking about your fancy solution, which only prompts people to say “That’s great” so you go away.

The whole book is basically how to get useful information by being curious about the potential customer, how to decode “That’s great” by asking for commitments/intros/money, and also a bit about how to know whether you’re talking to the right person in the first place.

Deploy Empathy is another great book on this. Think of it as the 102 course to The Mom Test's 101.

If the only thing between business failure and business success was contact with users, there’d be a lot fewer failed businesses.

Sometimes you just don’t see it, and that’s ok. Not everything is “I would have succeeded if only…”

I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault at all. Business people’s job is to understand what users want and developer’s job is to figure out how to best build it.