"Observations of a B2C PM who went to the dark side"
Product management changes a lot whether or not you're in B2C or B2B. With B2C being the clear darling of the press and different books on the subject, I wanted to share my views on what makes B2B different for a Product Manager.
Presentation made at La Product Conference in Paris on June 21st 2016
Press: big focus on B2C
B2B seens as not glamourous
Fell into B2C during the first photo sharing wave
Going from wave to wave over 11 years of B2C
MySpace and the social network wave
content discovery and reco with StumbleUpon
Sharing economy with BlaBlaCar
IoT?
Then decided to catch the biggest wave that was there all that time: adtech
1 year of B2B
My very biased point of view
If you look at the number of users, the change of scale is astounding
If you look at the associated Revenue, the change of scale is astounding, but the other way around
It’s the first of 2 things that impact a lot how your approach product management
In B2C the massive scale is necessary to generate revenue
B2c usually starts free
Either you find a way to make them pay (dating, sharing eco, free to play, subscription)
Your need a position of dominance to make it possible > can’t pull it off too early
At Blablacar we had to reach critical market share to be able to switch from a free model > users will try their best to find alternatives
Or you find companies who pay for ads
In this case you need eyeballs > a lot of returning users
Linked In, even Craigslist make the enterprise pay through job ads
By contrast in B2B, securing the first client is the challenge, but businesses are willing to pay (a lot more) for service
Dropbox moved to B2B looking for revenue, using its B2C product as a sales channel
Thousands of clients is already a lot
In B2C, all users have the same value.
“What about the core, most active users? They’re worth more!”
Counter intuitive, but in your roadmap you don’t cater to those much.
Your roadmap has 2 goals:
Bring more users in
Transform your existing users into more engaged users
You don’t cater to your most engaged users
(While at MySpace “they’ll be the last to leave”)
There are more users that you don’t have yet, than users you have.
3% of users can be discarded, except when they represent 25% of revenue
You don’t want your future clients to be like the 3%, because they ask for a lot of custom work!
In B2C YOU define your strategy
In B2B it’s challenging to run YOUR strategy instead of just running requests from big clients
“Minimum” doesn’t mean the same for a user who pays you big money.
Espcially hard during migrations
Change is very risky
Experimentation is more complicated
Unless you have close partners, and then they can help a lot.
In B2C, change can be received by uproar, but numbers tell you if it’s legit or just the vocal minority, the 3%
FB switching to the newsfeed
Data is your best friend!
With individual clients contributing significantly to your revenue, data-only appraoch is complicated
Many clients with different needs
Constant fight against custom work
Easy to do in B2B!
In B2C sometimes hard to realize, especially in the scaling phase. Common thing to miss by the founder. She created the service to answer her needs.
In B2C, data tells the truth
Can’t scale without the sales team
Hard to make changes without the buy-in from the Account strategist.
> You can get a lot more qualitatitve feedback about your product thanks to them. They know your user better than you ever will
Sales and account managers have a huge impact on your roadmap and on your rollout
A very useful tool, but a very important stakeholder
Quick feedback loop
Sometimes to cater to your users needs, you need to know what the competition is doing.
I used to just create an account to see what the others are doing.
Myspace, looking at FB and their “ad-free” one page experience
Sharing economy and the “design by AirBNB”
Much more complicated in B2B
It also makes recruiting PMs with B2B experience slightly more challenging :)