On Enterprise Product Management

My 16 year software experience has all been in the Enterprise/B2B space, as well as my 8 year PM experience. Now in Yelp, I’m working on the local business side of our marketplace.

I recently attended a Lean Product Meetup talk by Dan Olsen, about Enterprise Product Management. Dan shared the challenges in Enterprise PM that differentiate it from consumer PM, and how to work through them. I found the list to be very relevant, so here goes:

1- Clients dictating specific solutions
2- Having to satisfy both buyers and end users
3- Sales influencing product priorities
4- Limited access to customers
5- Prioritizing across multiple market segments
6- Inflexible product release deadlines
7- Struggling to apply an MVP mindset

Listing these challenges may make it seem like an impossible task to apply product practices in an Enterprise product setting. But I can tell you that over the years, I have seen Enterprise products adopt more consumer product practices, and I mean in a good way. Think of Product-led growth in Enterprise products, which didn’t exist a few years back, but has been applied very successfully by products like Slack and Zoom.

Culture changes slowly but it changes over time. For that shift to happen PMs need to be aware of these challenges and be the beacons of product strategy -and they need to have a backbone to do it. Otherwise they will end up being deal brokers ferrying information between stakeholders.

Watch Dan’s talk here for details on how to tackle the above challenges and read my previous blog post on PM backbone here. Enjoy!