How putting users first reshaped an entire industrial group

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In 2017, after my first startup journey, I landed a job as a senior PM in a startup that built consumer electronics products. But unlike most people joining a consumer tech company, my first project wasn’t pure B2C. It was B2B2C. And not with just any partner: with one of Europe's biggest manufacturers of electric heaters.

This industrial group had incredible products, serious R&D knowledge, and was known by every electrician in France.

What they didn’t have was a deep understanding of what it takes to build and scale a connected product in a world of smartphones and app stores.

This project wasn’t just about building smart heaters. It was about rewriting the entire DNA of an industrial group around user-centric design. Here’s how that happened.

An industrial group at a turning point

The client was a patchwork of legacy brands, acquired one by one over the course of sixty years. The result was a group with extremely strong industrial roots but incredible inertia. And when the market moved from old-school heaters with manual temperature dials to smart app-based control, they figured that they had completely underestimated the shift to the connected home.

They tried to react, not because they believed in the benefits of smart products for the end user, but because new energy standards forced them to. As of the French thermic regulation RE2020, new buildings were legally required to include programmable heating. So they built a “connected” solution with in-house teams, optimized for professional installers using Windows laptops and serial cables. It barely worked and definitely didn’t scale. So they eventually gave up and came to us.

They thought they needed a connected heater to tick a compliance box. But what they really needed was a new way to think about product and users.

Building for three users, not one

One of the biggest challenges of B2B2C is remembering that your real user rarely is the one who payed for the product.

Our connected heater project had three stakeholders^[1]:

1. The industrial group: my client, who is giving us money.
2. The installer: the one installing the product into people’s homes, who has huge influence over what gets sold and what doesn’t.
3. The end user: the person who actually uses the product, who doesn’t care how it got there and just want something that works.

Most traditional manufacturers are blind to the "end user" group. They think their client is the pro, and that’s it. They throw the product into the market and assume it’ll be fine. If not, customer support will hear about it, and maybe, eventually, so will R&D.

I actually ran a small study while working with B2B clients: out of 100 issues caused by a product defect, less than 4 issues made it to an engineer’s desk. That means 96% of the signal gets lost, filtered, or deprioritized before it can lead to any actual improvement or bug fix.

That logic worked when “product” meant only metal and plastic. It doesn’t hold up when you’re also shipping software.

With great scaling comes great responsibilities

The client's original solution failed not because it didn’t work in a lab, but because it could not scale. In the hardware and industrial worlds, scaling isn’t only about infrastructure, it’s about friction.

If 30% of your installs generate a support call, your product doesn’t scale. If an installer spends 45 minutes troubleshooting Wi-Fi pairing, your product doesn’t scale. If your onboarding flow leads to dead ends or user confusion, your product doesn’t scale.

This project forced them to understand that the entire product experience mattered. A smart product isn’t just hardware + software. It’s hardware + software + support costs + training time + frustration + satisfaction + churn + stars on the App Store.

The installers were treated like kings

One thing that struck me early on: in this company’s culture, the pro installer was everything. They were seen as the client, the salesforce, and the ambassador all in one.

At their internal events, pros were welcomed like royalty. When we presented the new solution, we were told to focus only on installation instructions, not end-user value, not app features, just “how to plug it in and be done with it.”

And I pushed back. Hard.

My argument was simple: if you want pros to sell the solution, they obviously need to understand which USPs cater to them (fast setup, easy wiring...), but they also need to see and believe in the end-user value. Nothing makes their life harder than an unhappy customer. So show them how clean the app is, how easy it is to adjust heating remotely, how it integrates seamlessly in their voice assistants and they’ll sell it with confidence.

After many back-and-forths, we rewrote the training to include the entire user experience. That shift alone changed how installers talked about the product, and directly improved adoption.

Designing for the current world

The project forced the manufacturer to confront an uncomfortable truth: they no longer controlled the customer experience.

Before, quality meant physical reliability. But a heater that turned on and didn’t catch fire was not enough anymore. It had to connect. Sync. Update. And not piss people off. The shift wasn’t just technical, it was cultural.

We had to help them unlearn old reflexes:

• Your product is not just the thing in the box.
• Your brand is not only what the installer says, it’s also what the App Store reviews say.
• Your margin depends not just on BOM cost, but on support ticket volume.
• Your roadmap can’t be frozen for 18 months. You need feedback loops.

That’s a hard shift for a company used to industrial timelines and V-cycle development.

It was never just about the app

Six years later, the product we built is still on the market. It’s one of the top three heating control apps in its category. It keeps growing, with strong reviews and high installer loyalty.

But the real success wasn’t just the product itself, it was what the process unlocked.

By working closely with end users, and by collaborating with a company whose DNA was deeply rooted in B2C, they began to see something bigger: their real weakness wasn’t in tech, it was in branding. They realized their group branding was completely misaligned with the expectations of modern users.

That led to a full strategic reset. They rebuilt their brand identity from the ground up and even changed the company name, a huge move for a group whose products had been into the minds of installers for decades. They finally understood that the end user wasn’t just someone else’s problem.

In the end, the product worked because it scaled, and it scaled because we designed it for friction, not features. And we got there because we never forgot who the real customer was.

Some key takeaways for anyone building B2B2C products

1. If your product leads to support calls, it’s broken. You don’t scale by adding support staff. You scale by designing out friction.
2. Don’t build just for the buyer. If the user hates it, no one wins.
3. Installers are salespeople. Treat them like partners, but don’t stop there.
4. Legacy companies won’t change without a fight. But change is possible if you show clear user value.
5. The best strategy is obvious: build something people love. That’s what creates pull, trust, and long-term growth.

^[1]Sometimes you even get more users (tenants, distributors, real estate developers... the value chain of infrastructure hardware is incredibly complex and should be a dedicated blog article), but still, we had to build for everyone at once.

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