More and more people are entering the position of product manager, but the skills, knowledge and experience required by product manager may vary widely among different product and customer groups.

With the explosive growth of the mobile Internet in recent years, product managers are almost everywhere. The Wall Street Journal also reported that “product manager” is the most popular position for new graduates. Product Management can also be a springboard to other, more senior roles with a technical background, good business-oriented thinking and excellent operational experience.

It’s worth noting, however, that most of the PMS that are now known to outsiders are primarily c-side (consumer businesses), as Facebook, Twitter, Uber and Google are known. After all, the demand for jobs brought about by the massive popularization of consumer-oriented mobile Internet has created C-end PMS.

However, the C-side PM experience is hardly applicable to enterprise software. Some people may not understand, this article tries to explain.

▎ is all about business models

The differences between the consumer business and the enterprise business are obvious, so their product management requirements are quite different.

It’s easy to name a few characteristics of a consumer business, such as user experience, AD monetization, in-app purchases, and so on. We acquire users by improving product experience, marketing strategies and growth models. When we have enough users, we iterate on the product based on their preferences.

In the enterprise market, products tend to live in a scale order model. The sales team sells this large and complex enterprise software product to a small number of paying users, and in the process of selling, there are various resource budget allocation discussions. For most companies, buying and starting a new piece of software is a huge undertaking, so enterprise software is really a compromise.

In the enterprise market, a single major customer can make a product requirement change, which can disrupt the original plan and schedule, but the B-side PM has to accept it. Trading, after all, is important and a direct source of profit.

Ironically, though, while the c-side works with more users than days, the B-side PM is actually closer to the customer the product is intended for.

For B-side PMS, this means they have to work closely with sales and marketing departments, and sometimes meet with customers to help gather demand and trade. But PMS are not sales, so the challenge for many PMS is how to focus on long-term product development without being overly distracted by sales needs.

▎ MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

MVP everyone knows, the following small cartoon is quite intuitive ~

The MVP mentality works for the C-end, but it doesn’t work for the B-end, because when a company is paying tens of millions for your product, it’s not likely to be looking for your MVP.

As a company, they only want to solve the business problems they are currently facing, and the salesman must prove to the other side that his company’s product can solve these problems.

So enterprise software is often professional, requiring a deep understanding of the business problems faced by users, which in turn requires b-side PMS to understand the business of users first.

▎ customers ≠ users

Also important, the buyer and the user are not necessarily the same person!

There are even decision makers: the boss makes the decisions, the secretary makes the orders, and the manager uses them.

The purchase of enterprise software usually involves a large amount of money, the use of which may require authorization from the SENIOR vice president and the VP to justify the investment to higher management or the board of directors. This is one reason why all enterprise software is packaged as a “solution.”

In addition, the real users are actually the business departments, they are the front-line producers.

As a result of this separation of customer and user, enterprise software has always been particularly “impersonal”. Administrators pay for functionality and business value, not a beautiful user interface. The needs of senior executives take precedence over those of their subordinates.

Lotus Notes is a database product with an E-mail client tied to it. No one likes the user experience of enterprise software, but it’s still a billion-dollar business for IBM, the software provider. Because for party A executives, the software has full functions, low risk and low renewal costs.

Finally recommend a few b-side product managers ~

  • Adobe’s Ben Gaines and Joe Martin
  • Percolate’s Carmen Sutter
  • Constellate Data’s Matt LeMay
  • Salesforce’s Dan McCall
  • Demandware’s Vinod Kumar
  • HubSpot’s Jeremy Crane and Mike Champion

Product Management for the Enterprise

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