Essay

Ask Teresa: What if Your Buyers Aren't Your Users?

Teresa Torres · Product Talk Free Intermediate

This is close to a direct answer to your exact question, written by a product discovery coach who works with B2B teams every day. Torres lays out the practical split: invest most of your time in what the user needs, and build the minimum checkbox features that unlock the buyer's sign off. It gives you a concrete way to decide, feature by feature, whose voice wins.

  • If the end user does not use the product, the buyer's opinion will not save your renewal
  • Spend the bulk of your build time on user needs, and treat buyer requirements as a smaller checkbox list
  • Keep validating with real usage data, not just what the buyer said they wanted in the sales call
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The question it answers

  1. Should my ideal customer be the person who pays or the person who uses the product?

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