Hey Rajamaran,
Glad to be here!
Well, you made me go back and listen to this interview because I had no recollection of what I was specifically talking about 
.
What I tried to get across back then was that there’s always a reason why salespeople do things in a certain way (maybe personal preference, maybe cultural pattern, maybe corporate policy), and that there are also recurring problems that salespeople get into when they do their work. Recognition and understanding of these problems provides a much clearer picture of what environment your product will “land in” and what negative feelings it might alleviate or help avoid. So, for example, when referring to ‘taking notes during a phone call’ feature we would look at recurring problems like
- difficulty to quickly and painfully record notes during a phone call
- pain of manually attaching (copying and pasting) written notes to right contact in CRM
- inability to quickly and specifically mark future activity based on exchanged thoughts in a phone call (i.e. time to call back, progress made in the last call, etc).
Identifying those problems was usually a result of hypothesis and educated assumptions by people with personal sales experience in our company, accompanied with analysis of customer cases by product/customers researchers. In short, we tried to have a task ahead of us (i.e. functionality to build) in front of product and marketing organization in the form of specific and easy to understand problem descriptions. Those then helped us also measure if we delivered - did we solve or alleviate the problem for our customers. In our reality, it was initiated top-down and then honed, challenged and tested by the whole product organization.
When it comes to time perspective, we kept certain more general problems in front of decision makers in the product org for years while more specific problems were to be addressed over the few quarters of development. As always, things are more messy in real life than in my description of it, so a grain of salt is needed to imagine what actually went on .
That’s my best attempt to unpack what I thought you asked for.