Insurance Is Sold, Not Bought, And Why That Realization Changed My Entire Approach to Product Leadership
When I first stepped into the insurance world, I carried no prior knowledge, no formal training, and certainly no master plan. Insurance was not my field of study; it was an accident of timing and opportunity. I joined a young startup as its first employee, eager, curious, and profoundly unprepared for the complexity I was about to encounter.
I had to learn everything from the ground up. And like anyone entering an industry with deep legacy, strong norms, and a very established sense of “how things are done,” I was handed a sentence that would follow me for years:
“Insurance is sold, not bought.”
At the time, the phrase bothered me. It still does.
I am, by nature, someone who values autonomy and free choice, someone who believes people are fully capable of determining what is right for them when equipped with the right information.
But soon I realized the uncomfortable truth: most people never actively choose insurance unless they are forced, nudged, or confronted with a necessity.
You cannot drive a car without insurance.
You cannot own a home without protection.
You cannot run a company without covering your risks.
In this sense, insurance is sold. It must be brought to the customer; it rarely comes from them spontaneously.
The sentence stayed in my head for years. Eventually, it guided me but in ways that created just as many mistakes as successes.
The Conviction Trap: When “Great Ideas” Become Expensive Detours
Throughout my career, I have been deeply involved in product development, business development, and implementation across startups, multinationals, multiple business units, and complex, cross-border environments. At times, I was the one doing the work; at other times, I was leading teams across divisions, orchestrating the adoption of new solutions.
Every time, the same trap appeared:
Someone has a great idea.
The organization quickly falls in love with it.
The product gets built.
Everyone assumes it will succeed.
And it never works as expected.
In my experience, products usually evolve very differently once they meet real clients and real conditions.
Conviction is essential; without it, no innovation would exist. But conviction becomes dangerous when it becomes a prison, when leaders are so convinced they are right that they forget the one truth that matters:
We do not decide what is good for the client.
The client does.
This realization changed not only how I design products, but how I lead teams, how I partner with distributors, and how I engage with executive committees.
Bottom-Up Thinking Is Not a Process, It Is a Discipline
Many organizations claim they are “customer-centric.”
Few truly are.
I have seen two patterns repeat over and over:
1. Fake Bottom-Up Thinking
This is when an organization pretends to involve clients:
“We’ll survey them.”
“We’ll gather some insights.”
“We’ll take their expectations into account.”
But the decision is already made.
The product team already knows what they want to build.
Client feedback becomes a decorative element, not a steering wheel.
2. Real Bottom-Up Thinking
This is harder. It means letting ideas evolve through friction, through confrontation, through exposure to the market before they are comfortable.
It means accepting that clients may reshape the product entirely.
It means acknowledging that experts inside the company, risk managers, underwriters, actuaries, and distributors also hold essential knowledge.
Real bottom-up thinking requires leaders to say:
“We have an idea, but it is not finished.”
“We know our expertise, but we don’t know the full truth.”
“Let the client fertilize the idea. Let the market shape it.”
This is not a weakness.
This is a strategy.
Because a product that is co-designed with the market becomes deeper, stronger, more relevant, and ultimately more profitable.
A Transformative Lesson: The Value of Stability and the Cost of Misalignment
One of the most defining experiences of my career involved developing a multinational insurance solution for a large corporation operating across many countries. The aim was straightforward: pool the risk into one location to create a stable, long-term price for the client.
For any CFO, predictability is not a luxury; it is a necessity. Unstable pricing disrupts budgeting, erodes trust, and complicates strategic planning.
But something blocked the project from the very beginning.
The risk managers on the insurer’s side were open to discussions, but they were resistant to one essential element: a multi-year commitment.
Their mindset was shaped by a long history of one-year cycles, constant repricing, and annual renewals. Asking them to consider a three-year visibility clause, not even a guarantee, just visibility, felt too risky, too unfamiliar.
The client, on the other hand, did not believe in price stability unless the contract itself reflected stability. They needed visibility. Without it, the entire product was empty.
The catalyst to change came through conversations with the client.
Direct client feedback triggered constructive discussions in which all parties, including risk managers, worked together to build a viable and successful solution.
Through this process, the three-year visibility element became not only acceptable but essential. Once it was incorporated, the product finally aligned with what the market needed:
The client trusted the solution.
The product became meaningful.
The sale shifted from a push to a pull.
All stakeholders finally moved in the same direction.
It taught me two fundamental lessons:
Lesson 1: Listening to the Market Is Not a Shortcut. It Is the Strategy.
Clients, brokers, and advisors often see the gap between intention and value faster than we do internally.
They are closest to the pain points.
They are the first to detect incoherence.
They are the ones living the consequences of our design choices.
When we fail to listen early, we pay later in time, money, trust, and credibility.
Lesson 2: Product Innovation Requires Organizational Innovation.
You cannot build a forward-looking product with backward-looking governance.
To create a solution that truly serves the market, you often need to:
Challenge long-standing guidelines
Adjust risk frameworks
Align internal stakeholders who do not naturally collaborate
Bring the board with you
Articulate the long-term value for both client and insurer
Convince teams that stability does not mean vulnerability
Insurance is a long-term business. Short-term decisions can destroy long-term viability.
But the reverse is also true: Long-term alignment can unlock exponential long-term value.
This is why meaningful product development is never only about the product itself. It is about changing the culture, the assumptions, and sometimes even the architecture of decision-making.
Why Clients Are Always Right Even When They’re Uncomfortable
Throughout my career, whenever I believed I had found the perfect solution, clients proved me wrong.
Not out of stubbornness.Not because they were difficult. But because they brought context, reality, and nuance that no internal process could replicate.
Clients do not care about our internal structures or our politics. Or our legacy systems. Or the constraints of our underwriting processes. Or our neat, beautiful PowerPoints.
Clients care about one thing: Does this solve my problem today without creating a bigger one tomorrow?
This is the essence of trust. And insurance, fundamentally, is a business built on trust before it is built on contracts. Yes, insurance is sold. But it is also earned.
Reversing the Process: From Selling Products to Building Solutions
The shift I made over the years is simple but profound:
I started with ideas.
I grounded them in expertise.
But I let clients, along with distributors, advisors, and internal experts, shape them.
What this creates is not “client-led chaos.” It creates coherence.
A coherent product is one that:
addresses the real need
fits the purchasing behavior of the market
aligns with internal risk structures
respects long-term sustainability
is easy to explain
is intuitive to adopt
and can scale without breaking
In other words, a product that succeeds.
Why This Matters for CEOs and Executives Today
The insurance and reinsurance industry is undergoing a profound transformation. Digitalization, AI adoption, regulatory pressures, cost constraints, and generational leadership shifts are redefining the entire value chain.
In such an environment, the leaders who succeed will be those who:
Listen deeply and continuously to the market
Build adaptive organizations, not rigid ones
Integrate product development with governance change
Embrace the discipline of bottom-up innovation
And cultivate trust at every step of the client relationship
This is no longer optional. Transformation is accelerating, and the winners will be the companies that replace assumptions with intelligence, conviction with openness, and rigid planning with co-created solutions.
The Most Important Lesson of My Career
After decades in the insurance and reinsurance ecosystem, across geographies and organizations, the most consistent truth I have learned is this:
Listening is not a soft skill. It is a performance strategy.
Every transformative product I have ever built was improved, sometimes dramatically, by the market itself.
Every one of my early convictions was reshaped by clients, advisors, brokers, or internal experts.
And every time I thought I had the answer, reality showed me a better one.
Insurance may be sold, not bought. But when you build products with clients, not for them, you discover something extraordinary:
You no longer have to sell. Clients buy.
François Jacquemin
P.S.: Want to watch the video version of this article? Go to https://www.francoisjacquemin.com/covered/from-sold-not-bought-to-listening-first-what-clients-taught-me-about-insurance