Totally! That's a really important extension to the point: beyond empathy for the user's pain points, and ability to communicate with them, as you say that experience helps you weigh up the importance of an issue even when you may not have a customer at hand to guide you.

You do a really good job of this hands-on skill, by the way: I was reading one of your old posts on Looker as I was writing this and thinking about how cool it was that you can go so deep and yet switch gears so readily.