GOOB: Get out of the building
A phrase that is often used in product development. The idea is that you should not spend all your time in the office working on the product, but rather you should go out and talk to potential customers to get feedback and learn about their needs.
Overview
"Get Out Of the Building" (GOOB) is a foundational product development principle emphasizing that teams must regularly engage with real customers and potential users in their authentic environments rather than relying solely on internal assumptions, analytics, and office-based decision making. Popularized by lean startup methodology, GOOB advocates for direct customer interaction through interviews, observation, usability testing, and open-ended exploration of customer problems, behaviors, and contexts. The principle challenges the traditional product development approach where teams spend months building features based on internal theories about customer needs, only to discover post-launch that customers want something entirely different or that assumed problems don't actually matter to real users.
Why is GOOB Valuable?
Getting out of the building prevents costly product misdirection by revealing genuine customer problems and priorities before expensive development cycles begin. Direct customer engagement surfaces unexpected use cases, workarounds, and contextual factors that analytical tools alone never reveal—a customer's actual workflow often differs dramatically from what internal teams imagine. Teams practicing GOOB make better product decisions because decisions rest on observed reality rather than speculation, reducing the risk of building features nobody wants. GOOB also builds organizational culture where customer empathy and evidence-based thinking trump organizational hierarchy and internal opinion, enabling faster learning cycles and more successful products despite limited resources.
When Should GOOB Be Practiced?
Get out of the building is most critical at specific development stages:
Discovery phase before feature development: Before committing resources to major features or product pivots, conduct customer interviews and observations to validate that you're solving real problems, not building solutions in search of problems.
Understanding edge cases and actual user workflows: When initial analytics or user testing reveals unexpected user behaviors, leave the office to observe how customers actually use your product in context, often revealing the reasoning behind surprising usage patterns.
Post-launch customer feedback and iteration: After releasing features or products, directly observe how customers interact with them, identifying frustrations, workarounds, and improvements that quantitative metrics alone won't reveal.
Exploring new markets or customer segments: When expanding into new customer segments or geographies, direct customer engagement reveals different needs, pain points, and competitive dynamics that differ from assumptions based on existing customer knowledge.
What Are the Drawbacks of GOOB?
While essential, GOOB has practical limitations. Customer interviews and observation require significant time, making them difficult to sustain as organizations scale or as other demands compete for attention. Customers often articulate what they think they want rather than demonstrating what they actually need—observing behavior provides richer insight than interviews alone, but even observation has limitations for understanding latent needs or aspirations. GOOB can overwhelm teams with qualitative feedback that seems contradictory, particularly when customers have strong opinions but limited awareness of technical constraints or competitive alternatives. Additionally, selecting which customers to engage with and how to interpret their feedback introduces bias, requiring discipline to avoid letting the loudest voices or most convenient subjects distort product decisions.
Making GOOB Sustainable and Impactful
To integrate GOOB as a consistent practice:
Create structured customer engagement rituals: Establish regular practices like monthly customer advisory calls, quarterly field visits, or ongoing user research panels, making customer engagement routine rather than reactive responses to problems.
Combine observation with contextual interviews: Move beyond office-based user interviews by observing customers in their actual environments—their homes, offices, or mobile contexts—revealing contextual details that interviews miss entirely.
Document and share customer insights widely: Create mechanisms for teams to capture and share customer feedback—recorded interviews, research reports, customer visit summaries—ensuring insights reach everyone making product decisions, not just product managers.
Balance customer voice with data and strategy: Use GOOB insights to inform strategy but maintain perspective that no single customer represents the whole market, combining qualitative customer understanding with quantitative analytics and competitive analysis for balanced decisions.
Get out of the building transforms product development from insular planning to evidence-based discovery, fundamentally improving the likelihood that teams build products customers actually want and need.