> I've never seen any production data for the app I work on.

The rest I agree with you, at least in a perfect world, but not allowed to look at production data? In the jobs I've had recently I wouldn't even be able to hypothesize what the problem is without looking at production data and production logs. Some of the issues wouldn't even have been reported if I wasn't checking the logs.

How do you bridge the gap from problem to replication and/or something actionable? Do you have someone knowledgeable enough in a role where they can feed you this information?