Articles

Regardless of background, we as product managers are obligated to know how to ship effective B2B (business-to-business) products.

After all, technology continues to evolve rapidly, enabling existing businesses to penetrate new customer segments and enabling new entrants to innovate. As businesses of all kinds expand their capabilities, they look to outside products to enable them to do more with their current resources.

Because technology is creating so many new opportunities, B2B products proliferate at an exciting pace today, and much of the demand for product managers comes from the B2B space.

To successfully ship B2B products, we need to understand the key differentiator of all businesses: process. Continue Reading

Over the past few years as a business-to-business (B2B) product manager, I’ve learned when it comes to the success of a B2B product, process matters far more than technology does.

What, exactly, do I mean? I mean that the way in which users accomplish an outcome is much more important than which tools they use to accomplish the outcome.

Businesses with stellar processes and subpar tools will generally beat out businesses that have subpar processes and stellar tools.

This learning is counterintuitive. After all, with consumer products, “if you build it, they will come,” regardless of the user’s existing processes.

That’s because consumer products have the freedom to set entirely new processes and behaviors. Continue Reading

As product managers, we solve problems for users – both new users and existing users. One of the best ways to get to know existing users better is to work alongside customer support.

Customer support teams interact directly with existing customers that are struggling. This means that customer support has a wealth of information about the challenges that existing customers face, and what kinds of solutions are more likely to satisfy the needs of existing customers.

Not only that, customer support teams are truly product champions – they promote the effectiveness of the product and actively soothe the customers who are most likely to churn. Therefore, better empathizing with customer support enables you to be a more effective product manager. Continue Reading

Many product organizations have stopped focusing on being data-driven, and are pivoting towards being data-informed instead.

What’s the difference between the two? Let me illustrate with a real scenario.

Product Study: Data-Driven Demand Assessment

One of my past initiatives was to find product-market fit for a particular product idea that we had.

The goal was to use landing pages, SEO (search engine optimization), and SEM (search engine marketing) to determine the following:

• Was our idea viable?
• If so, how should we market it, and to what audience?

We already had hypotheses around how to market the product, and what audience we were targeting, since we had already completed extensive qualitative and quantitative research to confirm that our product was solving a real customer pain.

We just needed to find the best way to bring that product idea to market. We decided to use as much quantitative data as possible to measure demand. Continue Reading