Customer-driven product development sounds straightforward – build what your customers actually need. But how many companies are genuinely doing it? Not nearly enough. Most product decisions still start internally, get refined in conference rooms, and ship to market before anyone has stood on a roof, opened the box with fresh eyes, or spent an afternoon fighting the installation instructions. What Ryan McConnell, President of Ventamatic ventilation, has been doing with the “Dream Shop” project is a vivid reminder of what becomes possible when leaders get out of the boardroom and into the real experience of their customers.
How Do You Gather Customer Feedback to Drive Product Innovation?
The methods for gathering customer feedback have never been more accessible – or more misunderstood. Many companies still default to formal market research: focus groups, surveys, and $20,000 to $30,000 research engagements just to ask one question of a target market. As Daisy McCarty, Fractional CMO at The Marketing Blender, points out, you can take those same questions to social media and gather real insights for a fraction of that cost.
Ventamatic uses several feedback channels in parallel:
- Social media polls and campaigns that invite customers to weigh in on product direction
- E-commerce review data, parsed with AI tools to surface the most common complaints and most praised attributes
- Direct customer contacts from people asking whether Ventamatic can still support a product installed in 1972
- Internal engineering ideas from team members watching the market
Ryan McConnell describes the social feedback loop this way: “Really that interaction with customers to be able to float an idea out there and see what their input is, is extremely important to us today. I find it absolutely fascinating the things that I think people will weigh in on, or the direction they think that the market will go. I’m always humbled by letting the general public comment on that, and I oftentimes get very different answers.”
That humility is the point. User-driven product development does not start with certainty. It starts with curiosity and a genuine willingness to be surprised.
For B2B brands newer to this kind of engagement, starting small is fine. One poll. One question. One comment section left open. The goal is to build a feedback habit that compounds over time.
Why Should Company Leaders Use Their Own Products?
This question might seem obvious, but the honest answer is that most executives don’t. They read reports, review data summaries, and trust that someone else on the team has field-tested the experience. That gap between assumed knowledge and lived experience is where blind spots hide.
Ryan McConnell committed to personally installing virtually every product Ventamatic manufactures as part of his Dream Shop project. He converted a barn near his home into a full ventilation showcase, using his own hands and his own weekends. What he discovered on the roof changed the company’s product roadmap.
“We’ve been manufacturing these power attic ventilators since the 1960s,” McConnell said, “and we realized we’re making people work harder to install our product. We should be able to make some small modifications to our product in order to make it far easier on the end consumer. That truly is one of those exercises that you’ve gotta be up on that roof and you’ve gotta be installing your own product. You need to do it yourself to really have that aha moment. I imagine there’s probably thousands of people that have told us that in the past, but it really, really comes home when you’re up there doing that project yourself.”
The product issue he discovered was real and fixable: Ventamatic’s power attic ventilators have flat bases, but a significant portion of the market installs them on corrugated or R-panel roofs. The flat base leaves gaps. Animals, water, and debris get in. Thousands of installers had worked around this problem for years. One roof, one weekend, and the president felt it firsthand.
What Hands-On Testing Actually Reveals
The takeaway for any B2B leader is direct: use your product as an amateur would. Come to it without institutional knowledge. Notice what is confusing, what is harder than it needs to be, and what is missing entirely.
What Is the Build vs. Buy Decision in Customer-Driven Product Development?
Once you identify a product gap through real customer experience, the next decision is whether to solve it internally or partner with someone who already has. This is the build vs. buy question, and the honest answer depends on timing, capability, and what your customer needs right now.
When Ventamatic discovered the corrugated roof gap, McConnell went looking for existing solutions before committing to in-house engineering. He found a domestic manufacturing partner who had already solved the problem and could deliver immediately. Ventamatic began selling that partner’s product while their own engineering team worked on a longer-term solution.
“In this case, it’s specifically we’re gonna build it ourselves and we’re gonna buy it as well,” McConnell explained. “But a lot of times it’s the market that will dictate that as well.”
That pragmatic approach reflects a core principle of customer-driven product development: speed to solution matters. A customer struggling with a corrugated roof gap today does not benefit from a proprietary solution that arrives in 18 months. The right answer is the one that solves the problem while you are working on something better.
The build vs. buy framework also extends to marketing. Ventamatic’s investment in brand-building content – installation videos, behind-the-scenes manufacturing, the Dream Shop series – is user-driven product development applied to the brand experience itself. Customers are not just buying a ventilator. They are buying confidence, support, and the assurance that someone will pick up the phone if a product from the eighties needs a replacement part.
Authenticity as a Competitive Advantage in a Crowded Market
There is a version of product development that optimizes purely for cost and speed to market. Ventamatic has watched that approach play out on Amazon, where some innovations are copied by competitors within two to three months of launch.
The response has not been to stop innovating. Instead, Ventamatic has doubled down on what cannot be easily replicated: authentic brand relationships, US-based customer support, honest installation content showing real mistakes, and a legacy connecting current customers to a 75-year manufacturing history.
“People can tell the difference,” McConnell said. “Being authentic with your brand – doing things like we’re doing with Dream Shop, where as I’m doing installations, I might break something accidentally – that’s the reality of installation. You are going to have things that don’t go perfectly. And showing that authentic side of the brand is what we’re working on.”
Customer-driven product development, at its best, is not just a research process. It is a cultural commitment to staying connected to the people who use what you make. That connection shapes not only what you build, but how you talk about it, how you support it, and how long customers stay with your brand.
Where Real Product Insights Come From
If you are making decisions based entirely on engineering proposals or dashboard reports, you are working with an incomplete picture. The most useful product insight often lives in a review comment, a customer service call, or a moment on a roof where a flat base does not meet a corrugated surface.
User-driven product development does not require a massive research budget. It requires proximity – to your customers, to your product, and to the real conditions in which your work is being used. Start there.
If you are working through product strategy, brand positioning, or go-to-market planning and want a team that understands both sides of the innovation equation, reach out to The Marketing Blender. We work with manufacturers and B2B brands ready to put their customers at the center of what they build.
FAQs
How does customer-driven product development differ from traditional product development? Traditional product development often starts with internal ideas or engineering capabilities and moves outward to find a market. Customer-driven product development reverses that flow – it starts with real user behavior, complaints, needs, and workarounds, and uses those signals to guide what gets built. The result is a product that solves problems people actually have, rather than problems a team imagined they might have.
What tools can B2B companies use to gather user insights affordably? Social media polls, e-commerce review analysis, AI-assisted feedback parsing, direct customer support transcripts, and hands-on product testing are all highly accessible options. Many of the most valuable insights come not from formal research but from getting close to how customers actually use the product in the field.
How do you know when to build a product solution in-house vs. partner with an outside supplier? Timing and customer urgency are the primary factors. If a customer problem is pressing and someone in the market already solves it well, partnering is the faster path to value. Building in-house makes more sense when no existing solution fits, when long-term cost savings are significant, or when the capability is core to your brand differentiation. In many cases, as Ventamatic’s experience shows, the answer is both – partner now, build for the future.
