The fact frequent, repeated contact with the customer isn't the norm is why so many interfaces suck and so many engineers could't design a decent one with a gun to their head (although, frankly, that level of stress might not induce thoughtful design patterns).

Instead engineers get hit with micro view after micro view, and they build it using test flows that don't mimic the real world, and then they all tie it in to create a tangled macro view that's a shit show for the user.

I've been working to bring recurring Shadow Sessions here at my workplace by creating a basic scheduler (which is really the pain point at scale) that just sends you and somebody working in the tooling you're building (we're internal tooling) every three weeks and the feedback is overwhelmingly positive and we're working to expand the functionality a bit.

So, all you out there who want a nice win, set up a little scheduler and get your Product, Design, Engineers, Managers, and TPMs in rotating sessions with actual customers at a lightweight pace with minimal asks to create greater empathy which translates to all of us potentially ending up with better software in the world as a whole.

A fella can dream.