It’s all about “listening” to the users with quotes because it doesn’t necessarily means face to face communication. Although f2f is best for relation building, it can’t really scale.
Data are everywhere these days and you should be gathering as much as you can(emphasis in can, it can be expensive). Take Google Analytics for example added to a blog, you can see your most read articles and write more of those, see where people exit and take action, setup interaction tracking and see what buttons are working best. You can do AB tests and compare results between two comment forms.
Same logic applies to a product as well.
But then it’s not just analytics and valuable information can be extracted from everywhere. Look at your DB and see what people have been storin (being cautious on prívacy laws). Gather NPS and see what feedback you’re getting from there.
Big companies usually have departments focused on data gathering and analysis, but even for smaller products, I would say that the best thing you can do is being data driven. Try to base your decisions with data that make sense.
All the best
