Christian's practice before starting a new product role: spend 90 days, every day 9-to-5, shadowing a single customer — in his account, a job seeker — before writing a line of product strategy. The point is to ground customer insight in direct, sustained experience of one real person's context, rather than assumption, secondhand research, or aggregate data.
This is a concrete instance of "do your homework" (see Product Sense) and of the curiosity/empathy traits in Five-Trait Product Sense Framework: rather than starting normal work immediately in a new domain, embed with an actual member of the target segment for an extended period first.