A Life Beyond Features for B2B PMs
5 ways to escape from the feature factory circus
Being a PM is hard. Being a B2B PM is even harder!
Here’s why:
Sales will promise features without telling you
Customers will tell you what they want, which often doesn’t mean users need it
Most people define success as delivering promised features on time
Measuring results is complex, as you probably lack substantial evidence
Let’s take this episode to share a few approaches you can use to overcome the everyday challenges of being a B2B PM.
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The Challenges of B2B PMs
Why is it so hard being a B2B PM?
If I had to describe it in one word, it would be ambiguity. No company operates the same way. If you try building a product that fits everyone, it will fit no one.
Another challenge is that those paying for the product aren’t often users. The decision-makers may be far from users, yet they call the shots. Unlike B2C, the customer and the user are the same. In B2B, you need to convince those paying while delivering a solution that meets the user's needs.
When it comes to feedback, oh, my friend, get ready to navigate through confusion. First, it will be hard to collect feedback. Second, you will get conflicting points from different companies. Third, you probably lack enough data points to make data decisions.
Given the challenges, it’s easy to fall prey to feature factories. Yet, shipping more features doesn’t mean delivering value.
Your job as a PM is to create value for customers and the business, not to ship features. The job is only done when you realize the desired value.
Let’s get down to earth with five ways beyond the feature factory circus.
1. Combine Wants with Needs
As obvious as it may sound, you need to understand both sides: customers and users. What does it mean?
Understand what customers want to achieve and how your product delivers that.
Learn users’ jobs and evolve your product to make users better at their craft.
The challenge is that customers often give you solutions unrelated to users’ needs. They may even pressure you to deliver specific features so they can close the deal with you. Don’t fall prey to that. Short-term that works. You get the deal, but eventually, your solution fails to meet users’ needs, and you will get in trouble.
Strive to combine both, here’s how:
Ask customers what they aim to achieve with the desired feature.
Understand how they reach the objective with the current approach.
Explore with users the hurdles they face and the opportunities they see.
With the above, you can craft a solution that meets both sides.
2. Iterate Fast
How often do you release features? The longer it takes you to release, the riskier your feature becomes. Yet, B2B customers aren’t fans of frequent changes. How do you sort this puzzle?
Let’s start with how you don’t do it:
Perfect features: Creating well-polished features takes too long, delaying learning.
Release to everyone: Making new features available to everyone at once will give you more headaches than you can imagine.
Internal focus: Getting approval from internal stakeholders will give you false positives, distancing you from reality.
To accelerate learning, you need to focus on iterations. Start small and grow gradually. That means getting closer to customers and users who are open to providing feedback on early iterations. Your goal is to learn what works and what doesn’t, so you don’t invest time into it.
When you focus on iterations, you learn what you don’t know fast enough.
3. Measure Outcomes
Ditch output metrics because they distract you. You don’t need velocity, story points, performance, scope change reports, etc.
B2B is hard enough. You don’t need unnecessary reports distracting you. For example, knowing your velocity tells you nothing about the value created. Start with the end in mind and measure that. Yet, there’s a catch: outcome metrics may be hard to measure.
Let’s take customer satisfaction as an example. To measure this metric, too many things need to happen before you know how satisfied your customers are. You need signs that you’re in the right direction. That’s the job of leading metrics.
To identify leading metrics, you can take your desired outcome and ask, “What leads to customer satisfaction?” You’d uncover the necessary aspects so you could continuously measure them. For example:
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score): It measures how satisfied customers are with specific iterations
CES (Customer Effort Score): It measures how easily users interact with your product or can solve a problem
DAU/MAU: What’s your relationship with daily active users compared to monthly ones? This show engagement
Start with the end in mind to find solutions to get there. If you start with a solution, you may miss the chance to drive value.
4. Help Others See What You See
Pressure from different organizational layers is the reality of B2B PMs. Everyone wants something done by yesterday. To break free from this situation, you need to help others see what you see.
Results talk louder than opinions.
Measure the value created by what you delivered and bring that to a dialogue.
Once, I consulted a company and was shocked when I looked at the feature usage report. 50% of features created over the last six months were never used. With that, I could ask stakeholders, “Is that the way we should work?”
Results help others see what you see, which brings opportunities. In the example I mentioned, the organization agreed to run product experiments before committing to features, enabling them to quickly drop bad ideas.
5. Welcome Qualitative Data
B2B requires product sense. It means understanding what makes sense for your product, business, and customers. To enable product sense, you need to welcome qualitative data.
The good thing about qualitative data is that people like sharing their opinions if you make it easier. By creating points to collect feedback, you can learn a lot from your customers.
What’s easy for them?
What do they struggle with?
What do they miss?
What do they love?
Make feedback easy, so it becomes natural, not a hard choice.
You will be surprised by how much you can quickly learn from users. Then, you can decide what to do as a PM.
Wrap Up
Being a B2B PM tends to be harder than a B2C PM. Yet, you can benefit from a few techniques to reduce learning time, enabling you to accelerate value. Here are a few principles to help you succeed faster:
First, build to learn, then to scale
Use what you know to discover what you don’t
Combine customers wants with users’ need
Know what success means before you define solutions
Let’s rock it together!
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Have a lovely day,
David
The 4 'Here's Why' points are the best summarization of the B2B PM challenges I have ever read. Bingo.
Sales will promise features without telling you — I hate this, but it’s the reality of being a B2B PM. Most of the time, sales or solution architects don’t involve you in the sales pitch, and you end up covering for their promises.