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so kind of central to what I wanted to talk about tonight was the fact that at least when I was starting out in product management there was a lot of like business to consumer or very kind of high-volume type of product management tips and tricks and things like that but I never really found a whole lot about business-to-business and kind of lower volume enterprise so I made a lot of mistakes so unfortunately we can't all make all of the mistakes so a little bit from my mistakes and so a little bit about my background I think every product manager has an interesting background that I've met I'm actually so from Pittsburgh originally went to Notre Dame for school college and and I moved out to Los Angeles I graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering so your science major I've never done the software engineering as a professional although I can code very dangerous please don't hire me we're not to Los Angeles I worked on it but I got really interested in the software side of the business and the software that was used to run the business and I started working with the developers that maintain that software and build on top of that software things like our provisions and the time and those systems and it turned out that what I was essentially doing was trying to make the software better for all the users including myself and that's akin to product management so eventually a jump ship to tech I moved back east back closer to Pittsburgh where I'm from when I moved to Yardley Pennsylvania which is outside of Philadelphia I was working for a small tech company called integrity working with life cycle starting with life science companies and eventually I signed on to sidecar which was is a marketing technology company for about 30 people when I joined I was the first product hired there for about three years and we had some pretty good success and they're still going strong today and more recently I joined Google Google so in terms of people in the room just right kind of show an Tommy giana's one other one of their roles and what's the like must be equal so my hypothesis is that a lot of management best practices are targeted at the business to consumer use case and that's - certainly a bad thing actually a lot of these things are pretty useful in the business-to-business context as well but as with a lot of project management in general if you don't add a lot of nuance to it and you don't sort of adapted to the situation it can become a bit dangerous so some scenarios that I found myself in where I used to be just a little bit too strongly and I never losing my way in terms of B to B so just kind of talking about what I mean because there's actually gray area here as well when I think about b2b and b2c I'm actually thinking about sort of some of the parameters that vary when you start to mostly increase the cost of the product or the deal size which tends to increase the length of the sale and then also you tend to have less users because of that selling to a more central point this isn't always true this is certainly a continuum you can probably name a bunch of b2b companies that have really small the cost of the product with short lengths of sale that act pretty much like consumer companies the relative consumer companies that do something similar to a high long length of sale high positive product what I wanted to kind of say when I say b2b at least tonight is we're talking about these long sale cycles you know six months a year you're really working the do you got is like there's old veteran salespeople that call on the same counsel over and over again you know we're talking about high dollar contracts lots of lawyers involved you're certainly not signing up in age and the number of users is also important because it also affects one important aspect which is the amount of data that you actually have available to you which is often a challenge that I so narrowing in on what kind of the crux of this is because there's a lot of things this changes but I think the biggest is strategy and the importance of strategy the things in the PME context so the thing about strategy is that I think it's defined differently by probably nearly everyone in this room you might be thinking of a different thing than I am you might be thinking of a different thing than the next person experience that in their own companies someone says that you have a strategy you think they don't have a strategy you're probably just talking about a different thing so we're talking about stories and I want to kind of refine when I say strategy you when I talk about so there's lots of ways to interpret strategy but I think about strategy in terms of the story telling a story about where your product is headed so where's your product going why is it going there or why is it important that it's going there whether that's to sort of your company or to an external customer and then what are the things you're kind of actively doing to go try to achieve that right so the strategy is not a road map it's not a collection of features in this case just how I'm referring to it your mileage may vary but I'm talking about trying I'm talking about kind of the story of your you kind of give that narrative you're doing fine doing it why it's important and and you'll see kind of where that plays into so it need to be product engine I think the number one thing you can do is to develop a point of view resonates with internally externally whoever you're talking to about what's going on with your product and there's a couple reasons for this and they relate to those values the problem with b2b product management when you're trying to use me to see techniques as they often rely on feedback loops and feedback loops tend to be really long in need of the product management if you're selling a product that takes a year to make a sale you can try something new or you can set up on a path or just you know a strategic if you try different story but if you're not gonna find out whether that really worked until a year from now depending on kind of your risk tolerance in your company that's probably a little bit long to actually understand what's going on and so it becomes important to anchor your point of view and something that again you believe in and that will drive the product forward in a way that as opposed to rely on those shorter feedback loops the second thing is that user data can be scarce so there's a lot of product management blogs and and tutorials and talks out there where we talk about data rate being data-driven running experiments looking at the data user data and feedback and it's really great but certainly encouraged it I think it's I think I love data I'm big sequel fan and like the users blogs and understanding what's actually going wrong with my product but when user data is scarce let's say you're a start-up and you have 20 customers and you have one person at every of those customers that actually uses your run legitimately users your products not only theoretically uses it we have 20 data points when you want something and think I have to tell everyone that it's not exactly statistically significant because challenges and trying to use that and the third is at the buyer the viral off that never use your product so does anyone do b2b product in to focus on me to be great that's awesome so you probably have encountered this is that your sales teams talking to different people than your users so often you'll sell in maybe a couple levels higher than your actual users you'll be useless will be managers or certainly frontline employees but your buyer will be a director or maybe a senior manager and the problem with this is that you actually you can't sell a buyer necessarily on four features but they're never any use like maybe the easiest product to use in the world but they don't actually have to use it every day right so you do all that stuff ultimately what you end up having to do is you can to sell them on a point of view you need to tell them why your products going in a direction that they need to head in why it's important that they head in that direction and then of course how you're going to actually take them in there whether that's with your product or future iterations of your product and it's often really important especially with a year teal cycle if you're coming into the beginning of the cycle you need to tell them what your product is going to be like not where your product is today because they're not actually buying your product now they're gonna buy your body as a PM is really hard actually in it then we could have a whole session on come and develop the story personally as strategies not easy I don't meet until they trivialize it as part of the talk but the thing is it's hard to come up with a story a good story they believe in that you think will increase sales and that will make your product successful make your users happy and then will get you where you need to go and so sometimes it's kind of easy to be like well I don't really have that for six months from now but we're agile so like we'll figure it out we'll test some things out I'm gonna learn a lot more and then you know we'll have another six months plan is looking on that's kind of hard it's really hard to you know user user features easy to sell the team on you can usually go to any engineer and today hey this is the absolutely most requested user feature let's build it I don't think I did too much pushback and most organizations you know you have a list of them they're very hard evidence you don't have to think too hard you can just go down the line sort by number of users that asks for that and and maybe testing is also kind of a way to say I'm not gonna try to make the hard decision between one of these you know this a or V is better I'm just gonna let the data tell me and sometimes that's okay the example that I think is as may be most relevant here would be you know like an Amazon right so if you're optimizing their checkout page you know a be testing a couple use cases is probably a pretty good idea and if you get 0.5% increasing conversion rate that could be untold dollars for Amazon and a lot further ecommerce sites too but in a lot of cases this is actually just you not wanting those things learnt enough about the choices that you actually need to make which is should we launch today or should we want to be and how is that going to reflect on that story that we're trying to tell our buyers they're trying to ages for a year from now for two years now I'll tip oh I'll sort of pausing to say all of this requires a grain of salt nuance to apply these situations sometimes this stuff is great sometimes it's not great and you just have to kind of deal it out in your own situations so I've put together a couple scenarios that I think I've encountered I've anonymized them to protect the innocent you know these traps myself so the first is around a be testing or around data in general by the way e be testing stuff is almost always a t-test a feature with just not the feature just as a counterfactual just to see what happens you know look at the data to make sure that nothing goes wrong the type of mini testing I'm thinking of here is more late should we launch this or not based on specifically this experiment but focusing too narrowly on the daily results causes you to lose track of the story so envision you work at this company it makes the design spotless is really sexy don't you and you're selling to large big budgets long sales cycle you want to conquer these efficiencies and other artifacts and their bug rewards and customer feedback natural language processing the all kinds of really awesome stats and there's a there's some numbers here that are really important like the accuracy of your hosting millions of data points it's awesome right your engineering teams are excited about it your data science teams are excited about it and you come in as a as a PM as I once did I said number one thing I can use a bill I need to be the engineers need to know especially computer science I can hang with some engineers and I'm gonna I'm gonna really be data-driven I'm we're gonna be data driven as a team I respect the fact that we've got such great I care see you invest in class where we're gonna use data to kind of really make decisions and so that happens you have some success we got to be got some good numbers up there as well great and I'm going to choose between doing something that's going to meet your accuracy go up maybe allow you to store more but or maybe analyze more data points great you can add instead of millions we can make in tens of millions would be really cool the thing is that your sales team hopefully there's a good P on your online sales calls listening to listening to these customers those things of the buyers listening to what's going on and you realize actually if I improve some of that stuff not sure that it's actually going to to make a difference millions and tens of billions to the people that are buying our software they're just big numbers which is like totally fair right it's hard to conceptualize whether how that would actually make a business so you find yourself in this situation where you've built a relationship with the team that's based on being data-driven and now you want to launch a feature that may not help the accuracy of your processing so the problem is that you find yourself in this situation and your engineers are going to eat me tested ready they're gonna want to say like well let's launch it and then let's see what what it does to our to our algorithms the problem is it's not really meant to improve the algorithms it's actually meant to do something else to to make your to add additional business value by the way it's not just sales bravely there's lots of ways to add value to a business and it's not always by doing the thing you do a little bit better it's also sometimes by doing things that are just around the edges of what you do and adding that additional feature additional business and so it becomes a real contentious point and it's definitely where we're gonna launch it we have to look it's the right thing to do for the product absolutely moves the product forward and in the right way but you've created this tension with your engineering team where you're gonna have to basically look over all these data results and and get into some challenging conversations about why we should still watch even though the diva did go down a little bit or obviously if it ain't your accuracy so so so in this case we wanted to do something to increase sales we wanted to do something to add an additional value to the businesses that we work with that's not something that is aligned with that that's what language processing success rate and so this is not a great area for a t-test secondly and not necessarily this scenario but in others maybe since we're good when you have lots of data and at least in my experience but I've done this B it's tough you don't have lots of needs sometimes you don't have lots of customers you've really big deal size in this city you don't need lots of customers but I mean you don't have lots of data in some cases and so it's hard to draw results you need a a lot of data to make statistical to make real statistical decisions and you have to be cautious and then you also need a clean way to run tests and that's something that is again a little bit different than that scenario but it's something that you have to keep in mind sometimes it's hard especially with like business critical products so one of the experiences I had running very business critical software that like couldn't go down and had very strict desolated et cetera so testing and that environment can be really challenging it has introduced a defect with a test it's it's a real problem it can buy the contracts customers and so maybe tell sir communicator so I'll talk about a little bit of some of the ways that I think you can kind of mitigate this type of a scenario there's obviously lots of ways that you can try to improve on this but you know focusing on the business but I you in and the things that you really care about from day one are really important when you go into a new team you know make sure that you first of all learn very early on before you actually know but when you do focus on the things that are really important so focus on the business value drive get the team on the same page about the business about unity drive and then give on the same page about which metrics you you do care about but make sure they are not you know honed in on metrics that aren't quite aligned with your business right because you can get yourself into and then donated you test unless you want to make a real decision it's just not it's not going to be up you might think to yourself well I think the ATB test is gonna work out on my favor so let's run it anyways because I can definitely get buy-in for my team to run the test and if it works out then go get to launch yeah that's a good way to get because this has you know the other thing about being super negative driven early kind of testing everything and being really relying on data is that then your team might come back to you and say well you say this is it going to increase sales how are we going to measure that and it's really hard to do especially with again to be in the context long feedback loops and those long feedback mean that it's really hard to test things against like sales cycles or I guess business things like that you can do some of it but it's not particularly significant Oh so the second scenario is is one kind of revolving around this agile mindset are sort of punting on the longer-term vision for your product because you know and a roadmap the no vision strategy and story all those things they're not all exactly the same it may be totally locate not to have a roadmap more than six months but you really do need to be able to tell that story about where you're excited otherwise someone else will so another picture so your company sells HR Solutions medium-size pretty fast growing businesses something an interesting product you do some benefits stuff yeah work charge and reporting structures and you administer time off from vacation and you're really good at it to the products agree you're you're doing a lot of really good things or their product you've got a solid six month roadmap you got all these features you're working on you're you know you're improving it at that level the challenge is that you have pretty long sales cycles and you have fast growing companies that you're selling to and your sales team needs a little bit more right and they are embarrassed because they need the not exactly sure where the products headed in a couple years and so they make it up you're focused on being agile you don't want to commit to anything decisive and so your head of sales commits for you the situation yeah that's it's a fun challenge so you're now building a payroll software and your roadmap is basically you know encompassed by this new challenge you need to put almost all agree on so here's on it besides sort of maintain the features they already have essentially now a paperwork opportunity and and you lose a lot of the ability to really go into the product in a way that you think is this best might be a good idea that might not be a good idea this assignment that equal who knows but certainly lose your autonomy as a product manager and and ultimately you know your your job is to figure out what to build and to understand where the products so I definitely had situations akin to this and there's they're super distracting and challenging and your inner engineers want to know why you know you're building this thing that sales will spill right but especially in a big deal cycle with big dollar value contracts there's almost no right not specially you don't have any requirements you don't have to carry you don't have like you have nothing ready needlessly paulus on it though they usually offer the customer respect which is so quick iterative releases first of all are really good in general so I want to sort of make that clearly agility is a really good thing I think it's it's great it's often the right way to figure out how to achieve your strategy or your story like so like sort of under the layer story having quick iterative releases to kind of do a lot of different things change direction quickly work with your team to get to get a lot of stuff out as a great thing but it's not a real policeman for a strategy also really good when you have fast feedback loops which is often not the case in in b2b product management and also good when small changes can make a baby that's often like the result of scale so if you 70 million users and you make a small change and users goes up by something now it can be variable and it's also also can be a factor of like what was the impactor looking for it is the feedback coupon in fact it's sort of a repeated earth has beat makers so just some some things that I've tried over the years that I think I've found some success with one is taking a real interest in sales and business development think the bigger the deals that you're trying to achieve the more that's important if you're going for like a huge huge kind of blockbuster stuff I think having an interest there is really important because you can shape the customer conversation if you can participate in the customer conversations depends on your level of willingness or ability to do that but I definitely had success just doing it myself I'll tell the story of the product I can sell the customer on something that we can actually also this one's really hard because I think culture is is really kind of a difficult thing to wrangle especially if they already exist but being open and honest with your team's about like where the product is actually headed what you're building what you can build what you can't build what you want to build and why you think that's important is really important and if you can find a way to set expectations on roadmaps but not commit to things because you know that software development just doesn't really work like that and then things take and then you expect it where you need to change stuff you know you're in you're in better shape that you would be otherwise I mean when you're trying to sort of manage the actual up the actual kind of reality and manage your business development or your sales teams and trying to like emerge those all together and manager engineering teams and manage everyone you get into this game where you know your realities don't really so absolutely again I've trivialized it with one bullet and maybe a different session it's not easy but it's really worth it so the last kind of scenario that I want to walk through is around feedback and user feedback but making sure that you're also listening to your buyer because ultimately that's the person that's going to be the decision maker a lot of pieces are great about their purchase decisions so your product and it was recruiting and hiring which is kind of a broad scope but you're like AI build with screening of resumes every job and you have the seamless onboarding new hires so you actually go like full life they go from when you want to post a job role all the way to when that job is filled and like literally the person is at their desk working that's all firm you your software is really nice because you actually span a full scope so that's that's really great great the thing is that you actually have a decent amount of users here because you have lots HR managers and recruiters and things like that so you build this elaborate feedback loop like you know your team is all bought into users that you want to make your product great you certainly want to do that as well you've got like software and tools where you're collecting all this feedback and you're organizing it your stack ranking it and and all of that happens and you're prioritizing these new feature requests and you find out that you know quarter results are in and you're not actually doing that well and your competitor is actually doing really well you start to get the word on the street that they're doing this compliance thing which is definitely not your users feedback because no and the problem is your buyer really does rate your son too late now chief hiring officer they really care about this stuff rate that especially the people requirements are actually positive good catalyst for products and so the c-suite wants something that the users don't and you were deaf to it because you were really focused on these are feedback so in the b2c world like it's really great because your users are your buyers you often have a lot of them you might even have scaleable feedback we're like thousands of people over busted a feature you can watch that feature and be pretty that's not the case so user feedback is good when you're using it to inform specific solutions so for instance you you know about this compliance need you found out about it everything's good you're gonna build it and you've built the interface and you kind of want to know like is this usable you know do people actually like it do we feel like it actually kind of gets everything gets out everything that we need great put that in front of users like please go down there these are feedback on it and understand what's working what is it where you may have missed stuff watch users use it all that stuff is great if you're using it as a qualitative lens to actually shape the product direction or the story that you're crafting that can often be really good I I think that one of the big lessons that I took is working products that very few customers and steals was that you can often use user feedback very qualitatively really effectively I think user feedback in a quantitative sense gets a lot of play play like people really love to talk broadly this is the most requested feature or I have X number of requests for this feature but often just talking to a user you can get a really good sense of what's going on with your product and if you only have like 30 users chances are they represent a good portion of your users you only need a couple other people to be like 10 percent of your user base and it can be really good way to shoot what's going on there often early but have hints of like what their managers are asking but again it's kind of a lens to literally also you kind of need lots of users if if you are gonna gather user feedback and really like use it and one thing that I make here not just about b2b bit about any software is that this implies that the feature level 2 so just because you have like you know a million users for your app if you launch a feature that virtually no one uses you actually don't have a lot of user great so that was like I used I lost this one percent of users use it I didn't get very many complaints let's go with it we did it ship it that's not great because you really you didn't get a feel for actually what's going on with user base if you launch it 100% of people use like 98% if you use it and it's like million users and you really didn't get any complaints like then you probably did a good job in you're ready to go so it's not just a product thing that's really true of whatever you're trying so understanding why customers are actually buy the product is often just as important as understanding why people are using the product what value they're getting out of the product in the b2b context you need to facilitate the sale and the sales cycle is just as much it need to facilitate having a great product in the first place sometimes those things are difficult to juggle but also understanding who you're selling to is similar like knows that off the top of their head early because has first-hand knowledge like talking to those types of people but it's often really useful to think to know like this is the level to be selling to or how it varies across organizations because not every business is huge so sometimes of the bigger businesses you're actually selling into a lower level than the smaller businesses and sometimes those people behave differently or how to think about things differently yeah the CEO of a small company will sometimes by software and CEO send out a bit of a different mindset than like a marketing manager who has like a similar size team as an undersized budget and it's also the buyer but CEOs how about a certainly personality to them especially the small businesses where they may be a little bit more like less risk-averse like more kindly looking to get an edge manager again those are generalizations so don't take them to literally but just in my experience yeah and I think ultimately true of all the scenarios don't let something else get in the way of your product vision whether it's convenient to do that or not so I think in this case you know user feedback got in the way of product vision that's something that really inhibits the like the future life of the product the story is like the star of the show and it need to be product management focus on it make sure that you have wanna develop a point of view I think even greater than just for be them what you're saying about the product the point of view they kind of the worldview that shapes your product is really important make it a multi-year plan it's not just a vision of what you're gonna do next quarter but it's really a vision of where the products headed why it's headed there and what you're gonna do about it and then make sure that that applies to users into the buyer of your product otherwise find yourself not actually making sales to focus on users you