What’s your strategy for building a product that solves real customer problems?

Be constantly in contact with your customers, like user feedback interviews. A good book on how to conduct those interviews so that you get out the information about their behaviour rather than what you think they need (most of the time people don't know what they need) but from their behavior you understand that. I would recommend you also to read this book - https://www.amazon.com/Obviously... it helped us a lot in the interviews with our users. I read it 4h and from it completely change the way we approached our interviews with users.

I prefer starting with an MVP and then gathering feedback from testers.

Conduct thorough marketing and customer research, including analyzing current pain points, collecting customer’s feedback and testing assumptions.

Customer research for sure. We ran surveys and user interviews - I honestly found the interviews to be the most valuable. Asking the right people the right questions will unveil everything!

I believe in putting myself in the shoes of the customer. Once I understand their frustrations and aspirations

Look at the reported customer incidents/asks.

I focus on building solutions around the jobs customers are trying to get done instead of just their wishlist features.

To solve real customer problems I focus on releasing small iterative updates instead of one massive launch.

I believe iterating quickly based on customer feedback has been the key to building something truly vluable.

Create a basic version of your product to test assumptions and gather early feedback.

Engage directly with potential users to understand their pain points and needs.

I believe the best strategy is starting with listening.