Don't Just Listen: Invent

The product management canon is clear: listen to your customers. Run user interviews. Validate hypotheses. Build what the data tells you to build. This advice is sound, well-intentioned, and almost universally repeated at product conferences. But what if following it too religiously is holding your product back?

At PR_D_CT DAY 2025 in Louvain-la-Neuve, Haroen Vermylen, CTO of Luzmo, delivered a talk that pushed against this orthodoxy. Luzmo, a Belgian embedded analytics platform, has built its competitive position not by asking customers what they want but by inventing capabilities customers did not know they needed. Haroen's argument is not that customer feedback is useless. It is that customer feedback alone is insufficient for building category-defining products.

For a Francophone audience steeped in lean startup methodology and continuous discovery, the talk was a deliberate provocation. Haroen's message was not to abandon listening but to supplement it with something harder and riskier: genuine invention.