About 10 years ago, I was talking to another APM at Google. He said, “I could never work on a product that didn’t make money.” I laughed and said: “I could never work on a product that’s all about money.” Early in my career, money was a dirty word. I didn’t wanted to pervert my product intuitions by introducing monetization goals. In consumer products adding monetization often meant introducing ads or paywalls, affecting the user experience.
My friend stuck to his promise and is now a successful VC focused on SaaS startups. As for me, I moved to the “dark” side about 4 months ago, joining the Google Maps team to work on the enterprise products. After 12 years of working on consumer products, my success metric just changed from engagement to revenue. What changed? After two years of startup life, I developed a desire to learn how to build and run a business. This time, I’m tackling an enterprise product line. So 4 months in, let’s talk about consumer vs enterprise.
What’s the same.
- Cat herding skills are still critical to the job.
Whether we’re trying to build the next Snapchat or Slack, great communications and relationships (aka cat herding) are still the #1 requirement for the job. PMs bring different disciplines together to create a product. In consumer product teams, that means bridging the communication gaps between design, engineering, support, and marketing. In enterprise product teams, we add BD, sales, finance, operations and the actual customers to this equation. Enterprise is more complicated because there are a lot of people involved in creating and selling a product. But it’s also simpler. Enterprise customers are often easier to reach and more direct than consumers. They are also clear in their expectations and why/how they use your product.
2. Delight, usability, and focus matters in enterprise products too.
We have outdated assumptions that it doesn’t matter if enterprise products are complicated and hard to use as long as they have the right features. That’s not true. In today’s world, users’ product expectations — whether they’re for work or for fun — are pretty high. We want products that are delightful, available everywhere (web/iOS/Android), and powerful. Newer enterprise products often target B-to-B-to-C (business to business to consumer) companies. For example, Google Maps API is sold to companies like Expedia and Airbnb, but in the end it’s being used by millions of consumers. So, that means all my experience with consumer product design is still relevant and get exercised regularly. I even ask the same set of questions for product reviews.
- Who are we building for?
- What problem are we solving?
- Why does it matter and why should we solve it?
The why it matters now involves a business case, but the ideas are the same. After 4 months I also realized that if we couldn’t crisply answer those questions, irrespective of target industry or delivery mechanism, we probably have the wrong product.
3. How I spend my time.
On a personal level, when I look at what I do day-to-day as a product leader, it’s been shockingly consistent in the consumer vs enterprise role. Everyday, I spend time:
- Bridge building — 1–1s, recruiting, building relationships with cross-functional partners, peers, and key stakeholders, and operational meetings to figure out how we improve. Everyday we launch features, communicate with customers, and make decisions.
- Getting stuff done — There are still a million small decisions to be made daily on the product. Whether it’s how we talk to a partner, defining an MVP, our website UX, or how we handle reliability issues for a customer. I still do tons of reviews, though today I do more deal reviews than experiment reviews.
- Product strategy and planning — As a consumer PM, I spent a lot of time playing with new apps, watching usability studies, and just using my product. These days, I spend that time doing market research, talking to customers and the sales team, and trying to understand alternative products. In both roles, I spend a lot of time thinking about where technology is going vs where they are now. Then finally tying it all together to answer the question: are we investing in the right products? What do we need to do more of? What do we need to do less of?
What’s different?
- Sales is hard.
As an enterprise PM, I am the first sales person for any new feature or product. In fact, I have to sell it to my sales team before I even talk to a customer. Both the customers and the sales team are often skeptical because most ideas are not new and they’ve tried or seen a previous iteration fail. So what’s my advice? Do it over and over again and listen and adapt the pitch every iteration. I also watch the masters closely. I’m lucky enough to work with some great sales and BD leads and it’s a pleasure to watch them work and learn from them. It’s definitely an art!
2. Iteration speed is slower.
As a consumer PM who worked on mobile and web products, I got used to constantly shipping. With weekly releases, I was able to fix bugs and address feedback quickly and run a lot of A/B tests to see how users would respond to a feature. As an enterprise PM, you have to move slow to move fast. For example, when I want to test a new feature, I need a set of beta customers, most likely they need at least 2–3 months to really implement and test this feature in their system, and then if I’m lucky and they love it, I can start scaling this out to all customers through the sales team which could take another 3 months. We move slower because once the product is launched, customers will rely on it to run their business, so it’s important to get it right.
3. My product is a business.
I have started thinking my products as a portfolio of businesses vs just products. As a consumer product lead, it is all about the next set of new experiences or features to drive growth. As an enterprise PM, I think about growing the business. That might mean ramping up sales vs building new features. Often the feature that grows revenue the fastest may not be the one that grows usage or adoption the fastest. This has forced me to take a much broader perspective on what success look like and how to get there.
Learn to learn…
I love learning and turns out learning to make money is really fun. We build products people love so much that they pay for it!
My advice to everyone who is thinking about the jump between consumer and enterprise or vice versa is to go for it. Come to the dark side, even if it’s just for a visit ;).
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