The Anti-Product Management Approach: How Tensorflight Let Enterprise Customers Drive Their Product Roadmap

Most startups hire product managers to interpret customer needs and build product roadmaps. Tensorflight took a different approach: they let their customers become the product team. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, co-founder Robert Kozikowski revealed how this unconventional strategy helped them land three of the five largest commercial property insurers in the US.

The Traditional Product Management Challenge

For deep tech startups selling to enterprises, product management often becomes a bottleneck. Product managers must understand complex technical capabilities, translate enterprise customer needs, and balance competing priorities. Tensorflight’s solution? Skip the translation layer entirely.

Customers as Product Managers

As Robert explains, “We’re joking that our product management department is our customer underwriter.” This wasn’t just a figure of speech – it represented their entire approach to product development. “We only recently seriously took the stuff like roadmapping because previously it was like just ask what they need improved and were just improving what they told us.”

Why This Approach Worked in Insurance

This strategy proved particularly effective in the insurance industry for two reasons. First, the problems were well-defined but technically challenging. As Robert notes, “What we’re solving is a problem that existed in the industry for years. But it’s kind of very hard because there’s so many corner cases with buildings, with underwriting.”

Second, the needs across large insurance companies were remarkably similar. Robert explains, “Because those companies have very similar solution, right, so we just problems. So we just kept talking to a few companies and basically just building what they told us.”

From Customer Feedback to Product Development

Rather than creating elaborate product roadmaps or feature prioritization frameworks, Tensorflight focused on direct implementation of customer needs. This approach helped them avoid a common startup pitfall: building features that seem important but don’t address real customer pain points.

The results speak for themselves. By listening directly to customer needs and focusing on implementation rather than interpretation, they’ve built relationships with “three out of five biggest commercial property insurers in US. That’s Fortune 500 companies, and they’re using the solution actively over the time.”

The Evolution of Their Approach

Interestingly, this customer-driven development approach wasn’t just a starting point – it sustained them through years of growth. Robert notes that only recently have they begun to adopt more traditional product management practices: “We only recently seriously took the stuff like roadmapping.”

This suggests that for deep tech startups selling to enterprises, traditional product management processes might be less crucial than conventional wisdom suggests, at least in the early stages of company building.

Looking to the Future

As Tensorflight grows, their product vision has expanded. Robert outlines their roadmap: “In case of medium term roadmap, we think in two areas, kind of T shaped focus… going deeper into insurance and from just providing just building attributes, we provide additional risk scores, additional more in depth analytics than building attributes.”

For technical founders selling to enterprises, Tensorflight’s experience offers a provocative question: do you really need traditional product management processes in the early stages? Sometimes, the best product roadmap might be the one your customers write for you.

The key is finding the right customers and truly listening to them. As Robert’s experience shows, when you’re solving fundamental industry problems, sometimes the best product strategy is simply to let your customers tell you what to build.