Brilliant man. Absolutely agree with you. Understanding the user actually helps you understand the problem. And you don’t understand the user by asking them what their problem is. You understand them by seeing how they live, how they use the solution, how they interact with the current structure. That’s how you understand their actual pain point. And can then apply you design thinking skills to prescribe a solution to the problem you have identified.

Thinking first like a designer is like a doctor given prescription to an illness before getting the actual diagnosis. Except if he’s prescribing a pain relief, he might end up killing the patient. In our case, losing the user to a competitor.