Flipping the Script: Why Your Customers Should Be Your Product Managers

Let's all admit what we're thinking but don't say: most product roadmaps are glorified wishlists built on the quicksand of assumptions. We convince ourselves we know what customers want based on that one angry email, that lukewarm survey response, or worse—the feature our competitor just launched. (Because nothing says "strategic vision" like watching your rival's product announcement and mumbling "we need that too" into your third coffee of the day.)

The Traditional Webinar: A Performative Monologue Nobody Asked For

We've all been there. You spend weeks preparing slides for a webinar, practising your delivery, and rehearsing answers to questions nobody will actually ask. Then you perform your digital song and dance to a sea of muted microphones and disabled webcams. The chat stays eerily quiet except for that one person asking if you'll be sending the recording afterwards (translation: "I'm not really listening").

The truth is, traditional webinars have become the corporate equivalent of those family slideshows nobody wants to sit through. You're essentially saying, "Here's what I think is important, and you'll sit there politely until I've finished telling you so." This top-down approach to customer communication mirrors what most founders do when building products—chase novelty instead of focusing on proven, familiar problems. As Forbes notes, first-time founders often chase novelty, but "boring" products that solve familiar, proven problems are often smarter starting points.

Having experienced the soul-crushing silence of hosting webinars where the only sound was my own increasingly desperate voice, I've learned that talking at your customers rather than with them is the fastest way to build features nobody wants.

The Reverse Webinar: Let Your Customers Do the Talking

The reverse webinar flips this tired format on its head. Instead of you presenting, your customers do the talking. Your only job? Ask good questions and actually listen. (I know, revolutionary concept.)

In its simplest form, a reverse webinar is a structured Q&A session where you invite customers to share their challenges, frustrations, and wishes while you take furious notes. But it's not just any Q&A—it's a carefully orchestrated extraction of the product insights your customers don't even realise they're giving you.

The beauty of this approach is that it bypasses the standard filter customers usually apply when giving feedback. Rather than asking them directly "what features do you want?"—which inevitably produces a wish list of disconnected ideas—you're getting raw, unfiltered access to their actual problems.

And let's be honest, your customers don't know what features they want. They only know what problems they have. Your job is to translate those problems into features that solve them. This insight-gathering approach is particularly valuable when you consider that SMB SaaS companies often face endemic churn rates of around 3% per month, which makes understanding and solving real customer problems absolutely critical for retention.

Setting Up Your Reverse Webinar for Maximum Intelligence Gathering

The difference between a useless chat and a goldmine of product insights comes down to preparation. Your goal isn't to have a pleasant conversation—it's to perform surgery on your customers' pain points.

• Send participants a short pre-webinar questionnaire focusing on their current workflows and frustrations—not feature requests.
• Limit each session to 5-8 participants to ensure everyone gets speaking time (and to prevent groupthink).
• Prepare open-ended questions that reveal processes, not preferences: "Walk me through how you accomplish X" instead of "Would you like a feature that does Y?"
• Have a technical co-host who can probe deeper when participants mention workarounds or frustrations.
• Record everything and transcribe it—the gold often lies in throwaway comments that seem insignificant in the moment.

When I ran my first reverse webinar, I was horrified to discover customers were using spreadsheets to track information that was supposedly managed in our system. Not because our product couldn't handle it, but because they couldn't figure out how to use that function. We'd spent months building advanced features while our basic navigation was apparently designed by a sadist. This discovery reminded me of how a founder discovered critical product insights through unexpected user behavior—latency issues, need for better overview pages, and the importance of issue detection that only became apparent through real user interaction.

From Conversation to Conversion: Turning Insights into Features

Once you've gathered your intelligence, resist the urge to immediately start building whatever was mentioned most frequently. The reverse webinar is just the beginning of your validation process, not the end.

The real work starts with pattern recognition. Look for these signals across multiple sessions:

• Problems mentioned by different customer types that suggest a universal pain point.
• Workarounds people have created (these are essentially feature requests in disguise).
• Emotional reactions—pay attention when someone's voice changes or they lean forward while describing a particular frustration.
• Terminology mismatches between how you describe features and how customers describe their needs.
• The dreaded "I didn't know you could do that" moment, which signals a discovery or onboarding failure.

After identifying patterns, create low-fidelity prototypes addressing these issues and share them with participants in follow-up sessions. This circular feedback loop validates that you're actually solving the right problem before committing resources. This structured approach to moving from problem discovery to revenue ensures you're building features that customers will actually pay for.

When we rebuilt our onboarding sequence based on reverse webinar feedback, our activation rate increased by 32%. Not because we added new features, but because we finally explained our existing ones using language our customers actually understood.

The Hidden Benefits Beyond Feature Validation

While discovering your next killer feature is the obvious win, reverse webinars deliver several other benefits that traditional customer research methods don't:

• They create champions within your customer base who feel invested in your product's evolution.
• They surface case studies and testimonials organically—participants often share success stories you never knew about.
• They reveal competitors' weaknesses without you having to ask directly.
• They provide ready-made language for your marketing copy—directly from your customers' mouths.
• They humanise your company, transforming you from faceless software vendor to attentive problem-solver.

After running quarterly reverse webinars for a year, we noticed our NPS scores were consistently higher among participants—even when we hadn't implemented their specific requests. The simple act of listening created goodwill that money can't buy. This aligns with research showing that most workplace stress is episodic and manageable with proper support—when leaders (or companies) provide genuine attention and care, it significantly impacts team cohesion and performance.

Avoiding the Common Pitfalls

Of course, like any methodology, reverse webinars can go horribly wrong if mishandled. Here's how to avoid the most common disasters:

First, resist the defensive reflex. When customers criticise your product, your amygdala activates and you'll want to explain why they're wrong or why that limitation exists. Don't. Your job is to collect information, not justify shortcomings.

Second, beware the loudest voice. In every group, there's someone whose opinion comes packaged with extra volume and conviction. Their feedback isn't necessarily more valuable—it's just delivered with more confidence.

Third, don't make promises. The temptation to say "we'll add that to our roadmap" is nearly irresistible when faced with an elegant solution to a customer's problem. Resist it. You're gathering data, not making commitments.

Finally, remember that customers are experts in their problems, not your solutions. They'll often suggest specific implementations that would be disastrous if taken literally. Focus on understanding the underlying need, not the proposed solution.

Implementing Your Reverse Webinar Programme

Ready to let your customers become your unofficial product managers? Here's how to get started:

• Schedule monthly sessions with different customer segments (new users, power users, at-risk accounts, etc.).
• Create a standardised discussion guide that your team can follow to ensure consistent data collection.
• Establish a system for rapidly sharing insights across product, marketing, and support teams.
• Develop a lightweight method for testing assumptions derived from sessions.
• Create a feedback loop to show participants how their input shaped your product.

Remember, the goal isn't to run a perfect session—it's to create a sustainable practice of customer-informed product development. Start small, refine your approach, and scale up as you see results. This approach becomes even more critical when you consider that digital startups demonstrate greater success compared to traditional startups but face more complex challenges, particularly around effective application of lean startup approaches.

After my product failure taught me the cost of building in isolation, I've become evangelical about continuous customer dialogue. Not just because it's good practice, but because my bruised founder ego can't handle another product nobody wants.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Product Development

Here's what we all need to accept: most of us are building products based on assumptions that are, at best, educated guesses. We convince ourselves we understand our customers because we've read their support tickets or stalked them on LinkedIn.

But in reality, we're often just projecting our own preferences onto them, building solutions for problems we think they have rather than problems they actually face.

The reverse webinar methodology isn't just another customer feedback channel—it's an acknowledgment of humility. It's admitting that despite all our expertise and market research, we don't fully understand our customers' reality until we shut up and listen to them describe it in their own words.

And yes, this approach requires vulnerability. You'll hear things about your product that will make you wince. You'll discover features you've poured months into that nobody uses. You'll realise your UX isn't nearly as intuitive as you thought.

But that momentary discomfort is infinitely preferable to the prolonged agony of watching your product fail because you built it in an echo chamber.

The next time you're planning a webinar to tell customers about your brilliant new feature, consider flipping the script instead. You might discover that the killer feature your product needs isn't what you thought at all—it's what your customers have been trying to tell you all along, if only you'd give them the microphone.