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hi everybody i am aisha ishaq and i am a senior product manager at um spotify and i'm really excited to talk to you guys today about building b2b versus b2c products um i think this is a very relevant and important topic because um in today's fast-paced tech world um as company business models change so quickly as companies try to find a different market fit um it's becoming more and more likely that you might actually start off as a b2c product manager and become a b2b product manager overnight or you know vice versa um so without further ado what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna get started with um sharing a little bit of my topic um i think that kind of gives you a sense so a little bit about me um throughout the course of my career um i've moved from uh v to b at um one of the sas companies called netsuite i've moved to deloitte where i worked as a product consultant and i worked as an analyst and you know we helped um solve solutions in the b2b world as well as the b2c world i've also um you know was a product manager on where i worked on more of the fintech um consumer facing apps as well as on the b2b side on the commercial side um and then um in my recent career um i've been the only product manager i've been the key product manager at megaphone and this was a b2b basically podcasting platform a majority of our big customers were large publishing um or media companies um and then since then i've moved over to um spotify and in the spotify world as you know it's one of the largest um b2c consumer apps that are out there um streaming apps um and then now of course i'm giving you this presentation um at product school um so a little bit over my topic and what we're gonna go through today first i want to go over um the differences between b2b and b2c products so what is that what is the actual definition um and then the next piece i'm going to talk about you know what are the overall responsibilities of a product manager like what do b2b and b2c actually share um in delivering those type of products and then the third piece i'm going to talk about some of the differentiators between the two um and then we'll wrap it up with some of our key takeaways um so before we get started and you know kind of sense you know i like to start with quotes um one of the biggest quotes is um one of my favorite quote maker is really peter drucker who's really the father of modern day uh product modern day management and his thing is is that one of the quotes that really resonated with me is that the greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence is to act with yesterday's logic and what does that really mean for us today in our conversation is that um like i said when you have a mindset of you know this is a b2b product and you take your eyes off of the what's happening in the larger marketplace and then you become you know your company moves into you know a consumer app or you're forced to pivot in your career you can't use the logic that you used in your previous role you always have to be open to what other people are doing and i think part of being a product manager is becoming like a problem solver so you're always on the hunt you're part problem solver part entrepreneur but you're always on the hunt for opportunities in the marketplace you're always on the hunt for tactics that you can use to deliver your product successfully and you're always on the hunt to learn um from different you know disciplines um you know kind of like a jack of all trades master of none but the mastery really is bringing all those uh different disciplines together so i thought that would share that so a little bit about what um the differences between the b2b and b2c products b2b really means is the consumer is really a business so you're selling to a business a lot of these type of products are focused on solving you know organizational problems such as you know increasing revenue which is you know all organizations care about reducing costs um you know maximizing resources um you know removing bottlenecks as they go and realize their marketplace streams and majority of these buyers or users the user and buyer is usually not the same but the buyer is usually quite sophisticated so this is not someone that you can kind of manipulate they know their business very very well and they have a really good understanding of their marketplace so when you're coming to offer a product a solution it has to be very targeted and you have to come in with a lot of domain expertise on the other side so an example of this type of business is like slack slack is like i think has done really really well in embedding themselves into different um uh different businesses and recognizing the need for seamless communication that doesn't rely on emails um and it's really i think turbo charged a lot of companies i mean we use slack uh spotify um and then if you switch over to the b2c side this is really about businesses that cater to consumers so everyday people and this type of buying is very emotion based um the the users really focused on personal benefits and experience um and i you know made a little boo-boo in there they're not they're non-sophisticated buyers so there's a little bit of a typo in there so i apologize um and i think the key thing uh to recognize between the two and the tactics that you use is that spotify for example is a b2c consumer but now that we're becoming like the largest audio marketplace one of the areas that we're trying to move into is the b2b world obviously right but with the acquisition of megaphone which is where i came from um so you can see quickly that product managers that are on the b2c side will have to interact with product managers on the b2b side and the tactics that work for one may not work for the other um similarly for slack who knows where their marketplace is going to be in terms of you know the next three years are they going to move into you know more of a linkedin you don't know so that's i think what what makes this topic um very very relevant um so let's talk about what a product manager really does i know there's a lot of definitions out there that are floating you know you're the ceo of a product which is you know one that's quite common that i hear all the time um you sit at the nexus of you know all of the different um business disciplines your job is to find product market fit the real i think definition that really i think kind of captured through the course of my career what our product manager really does is this quote from marty kagan um from his book inspired and what it is is that there's so many things that go into building a successful product and when the product succeeds it's because everybody on the team from marketing to finance to c-suite to sales to whoever might be all did what they were supposed to do but when the product fails it's a product manager's fault and i'll take it one step further in saying what the product manager actually does so when you do your job you're basically distilling the vision of what the product what the problem space is and what the product is going to do to fix that problem space and then you're bringing together different disciplines whether they're in design within their marketing whether they're engineering to try to fulfill that vision and what you're doing throughout all that is you are empowering each of those disciplines or each of those lines in order to fulfill that vision so you're essentially removing blockers and you are literally coming in each time wearing a different head and speaking their language in order to help them achieve what they need to do and then so when it goes well when everything is going well uh you're invisible and that that's how it really should be and when things are not going well you're extremely visible that's how i translate this quote so it really kind of distills when you're doing well as a product manager versus when you're not doing well so at a high level i'm going to talk through some of the key areas in a product manager's um responsibilities i think one of the key ones is the product manager is obviously responsible you know for identifying customer opportunities um and then determining you know what gets built and then making sure that actually gets delivered to the marketplace in a way that impacts the company's revenue i mean that's a key aspect that we need to do uh we need to define so i'm gonna focus on a couple of four areas that i think are the most crucial um and there's also different things within each of these sub categories there are subcategories within each of these categories but i'm going to talk through the high level so number one is the customer problem definition space so all of the discovery work that goes in and understanding the customer understanding the user understanding what issues that they're facing all of those i would put it under the custom problem definition the next one is based on those problems and based on that area that you've defined you've obviously identified key areas that you want to focus on so now what it becomes is your hypothesis or your features that are going to be addressed in those you're going to put them into some kind of backlog onto what needs to get built and then what you're going to do is try to sequence out that backlog into like a roadmap so part of what i put under that category is like that roadmap planning then the next piece is really identifying um what is the mvp or the minimum viable product what is the impact that you're going to have on the end user which features are you going to prioritize in order to validate some of the hypotheses that form your backlog and form your roadmap so this is when you're starting to move more into execution and then once you do that you work with the engineering team and you build it then you have to define how you're going to measure the success of that mvp and the success criteria and then you're working with the customer success or marketing and sometimes you're wearing all of those hats to ensure that it gets rolled out to key people so you're identifying who you're going to roll it out to how they're going to get it how you're going to collect the results and feedback so that you can scale it and get it into the marketplace and then the final piece is really about you know stakeholder management so at each of those stages depending on if you're you know it doesn't matter if you're b2b or b2c there's some element of stakeholder management so that's with your internal stakeholders such as your engineering your c-suite your marketing your sales you know in the case of b2b um sales i don't think is as important on the b2c side because i think you're trying to get people to buy um as automated as possible but still there's some element to that so you're going to be working with some key internal stakeholders and i think this is one of the areas where b2b and b2c really really have a big differentiator [Music] all right so let's walk through each of the different buckets of responsibilities and see how they compare in terms of the b2b and b2c world so in terms of identifying the customer problems and associated opportunities product managers use a couple of tactics um to do this so this could be discovery sessions or interviewing sessions which i put under the qualitative um category and this is where you go off and you really are getting to know who the user is in the b2c world it's a very large user base so obviously you're focusing more on demographics like you're saying it's just for females this is for you know males 18 to 24 and then what you're doing is you're going to go and try to interview some of those people um and then but if you have some historical information what you can also do is you can actually look at quantitative data to see like what their behaviors are like and your reliance on the quantitative tactics um to identify the pain points like the heat mapping what they're actually doing because it's such a large user size you won't be able to interview everybody so quantitative tracking or quantitative tactics become key for you in identifying the personas and identifying what their problem problems are and their pain points and majority of the pain points are really related to you know wanting some of their wishes fulfilled wanting a certain type of experience and you're focusing more on behavioral psychology when it comes to the b2c world um in the b2b world um your tactics actually uh you do use some quantitative but that your tactics that you rely on are really qualitative and this the user base is much smaller but each user is more influential so uh you could have one customer that only has like five users in your system but each of those users could be like a c-suite and they have the ability to basically like just getting one of them wrong has the ability for you to lose the entire customer so you could see why um the next point is really really important in terms of defining the pain points so you have to rely on what i call very intentional and deep relationship building with each of your customers and in some customers like your job is to basically figure out like how to interact with different types of people at different levels of the company so it's not just talking to the c-suite but you need to be able to talk to someone like an analyst for example at the very you know junior level because sometimes the junior level actually has more influence than even the c-suite level in terms of the problems that you're looking to solve and then the pain points like i mentioned earlier in the earlier slide are really related to business demands and expectations so revenues cost customer satisfaction they're related to resource planning like some key things they're looking for you to remove a blocker that they have internally in order to supercharge their business so i think that's a key thing um to know the other thing is as part of your problem solving when you solve for a problem you can't just think of that one particular user that you're thinking of but when you're really defining the solution of the problem you have to think you have to take into account the entire business operation and the landscape that they're operating in as well as their marketplace as well as their competitor as well as up and down and sideways um in the business in addition to the particular users that you're talking to so i think that's a key thing um to point out so once you've kind of defined what the pain points are and you have some ideas and you've really embedded yourself in that company and you've really figured it out the next piece is that i wrote the roadmap planning piece or what i call the solution the hypothesis testing phase so this is where you're determining what problems basically that you are going to prioritize and how you're going to go about actually addressing it so one thing to know i think that product roadmaps people have different feelings about it but to me that they're living documents and they're basically agreements as you're going along right um in the b2c world you don't necessarily have to share it you can kind of infer it to people so they can kind of get a sense on what's coming so you can be a little cagey about what's coming and you know build some kind of like buzz about it in the b2b world the product world map is essential it is literally the distillation and the foundation of your company's strategy and people actually use that roadmap to determine whether they're going to become a customer or remain a customer so as you can see when you're determining what goes into it it's very very important that when you're prioritizing b2b that you have a rigorous decision matrix you basically have to weigh the needs of the influential customers that you have and just to give you a sense of like what i have faced um one of my uh megaphone probably had like 500 plus let's just say um customers out of that i would say five to ten ten would probably be very influential but i would say that three to five were super influential in terms of driving some of the things are needed the good news is that because they're all operating in the same marketplace kind of what they needed there was a lot of overlap but i just want to tell you in terms of sequencing some customers are louder than others and this is where relationships really come in because you have to be able to determine what is driving that particular pain and what and be able to basically sell a solution and sell a narrative that's a win-win so you want to be able to meet their needs so that they can continue to be a customer and you're really solving their problems but you also want to weigh it in with where you want to position your product in the marketplace so you don't want to lose sight of your product vision and you don't want a couple of customers basically you know weighing down the entire roadmap so you it's it's a tough balancing act and you also have to take into account there's also prospects that you really want to win in the marketplace that are in the sales funnel so sales people they need to be able to close and the roadmap is one of the key things that they need to close you'll be brought in so you need to be very intentional of how you talk about the features and the timelines and all of that um and then there's an overall of course marketplace chatter with your competitors and what people want to do and you know how you're being positioned and what the noise is about your particular company so because of that it's very important for you to come with a rigorous decision matrix so the decision matrix is something that you know it will probably take another discussion on what that goes into that but suffice to say it's a matrix where you develop it and you get buy-in from everyone that's internal from sales to c-suite and what it helps you do is it basically helps you um assess the needs that are coming in or the requests that they have whether they fit in with your product strategy what the business impact will be to the customer what is the technical feasibility that's associated with that aka the lift to actually build it and do you have a way to track um the success of that particular feature in terms of like revenue um that i think is also very very important um one of the things that i wanted to you know call out as well is that in the b2b world product and sales actually work very very closely together and your sales teams because b2b selling is so complex and you are selling to up and down the buyer could be at any level really of the company um the sales team essentially has the way to think about it the almost the same influence as a big customer in terms of what shows up on the roadmap so it's very very important that you are able to speak their language and that you're able to distill things and things that are beneficial that they can go out and actually sell and then in the b2c world the flip side so sales is less um important because there's not that many uh you know the stakeholders that you're selling to you're selling to basically the end user and the end users are care about you know experiences um either user experience and usability especially so they're comparing you against everything else that's in the marketplace so they are very less forgiving of issues that you have in that and then so now you can see where um and the people who tend to solve for that are your product designers so did your ux ui designers so they have a little bit more influence in terms of what delights the customer because they're you know helping you do that research helping you come up with ideas um identifying areas where there's design gaps and all of that so you can really optimize the user experience and i think i already touched on this final point which is that the roadmap visibility is critical for you to be customers so you have to actually be able to share the roadmap with them so that's why you have to be very intentional and you have to actually have a story on why every item on your roadmap why you placed it there you have to be able to answer that and you have to be able to give them visibility into the short term as well as the long term and if there are any changes that happen during that period you have to be very proactive and communicate that out and you have to decide like what how you're actually going to communicate it out depending on the relationship that um you have for the customer okay in terms of mvp development mvp rollout b2b customers um b2c customers you know the mvp can be a bit raw as you get feedback because you can get feedback from anywhere but remember with b2b customers the feedback that you're getting these are people that are making a decision in terms of they're going to spend a lot of money on you their expectation is higher in that they want the not necessarily on the design or ui but their expected expectation is higher on the functionality and the way that it's solving the problem it has to solve the problem in a way that can be easily seen that this is a value-add i think that is a critical thing so like you cannot for example if i'm presenting an analytics tool the analytics tool it's okay if it's not like has all the bells and whistles so just scheduling the report or doing all of that but it's got to get all of the key information that needs to be in there it's got to all be in there for example um in terms of b2b mvp robots one of the things that i have found is that it's so much easier to roll out um mvps um in the b2c world because you can do a b testing in some cases and you can do cohort analysis and you can do all that it's a little bit more complicated when you want to do it for b2b because what you have to do is this whole extensive onboarding process where you have to decide okay which customers are going to be part of the beta where the where are they in the renewal funnel um how much information do you want to share with them uh are they in a process of talking with a competitor for example like so many other factors go into it and then you basically what i have done is i actually do onboarding sessions where i am collecting the general feedback that they're getting as we give them the demo on how to use it and then after that it's all about how do you collect the feedback from them um so i have to create a framework to collect the feedback from them um quantitatively as well as qualitatively so it's a little bit more involved you have to have a little bit more documentation because not all the beta users are going to be at the same level and they shouldn't be and you just have to be prepared for all of those questions and make yourself available so it's a lot more high touch than i would say um in the b2c world um in the b2c world success validation is more straightforward you're checking on usage you're checking on um you know key metrics like how much they're clicking on this how much in the b2b world it's not like that um the usage gives you no um it gives you some information but some of the real information that you need to get is only gathered by interviewing because what you're really validating is are we solving a real operational or business problem here and you have to be able to collect that feedback up and across so part of your b2b mvp beta cohort has to include a large um like it has to include a more varied sub subset of users so you can collect that feedback and really assess and sometimes what has happened is that you put an mvp people agreed that that was the problem this is what we're gonna solve and then by putting the mvp out there you've actually uncovered a whole iceberg of other problems which is a great opportunity for you but you have to be able to you wouldn't know that just from doing quantitative you know tracking or anything like that you'd have to actually do like almost another round of like interviews to get that um so i think that's that's also super important um in terms of um stakeholder management uh a stakeholder from uh so just let's define what a stakeholder is from a product manager's perspective so i would say a stakeholder is anyone internal or external to the company that has the power to prevent you from shipping solutions to the marketplace uh that is a stakeholder um in the b2c world the stakeholder is really the end user is it ready for the end user or not um and the internal stakeholders are you know typical i think for both it's you know legal marketing finance customer success all of that but there's usually no sales team involvement or c-suite involvement to a large extent like it's gonna be driven a little bit by this design feel like we're ready this product feel like we're ready this engineering feel like we're ready but if there's a little bit of more experimentation that's a lot allowed and a little bit more leeway for the product manager in the b2c world just because if you lose a b2c end user it's not the end of the world because you have such a larger base right in the b2b world one customer could wreck your business losing one user could be the user that influences um the subscription to be completely dropped that entire company so there goes that whole revenue puff the internal u internal stakeholders are the same as the bdc the only thing that i think is more important is that it is vital for your sales team to be on board um with all the feature development that you're doing and product development that you're doing just because it's a high touch selling business that i've mentioned over and over again so it's very very important that you have a very strong relationship with your sales team and you really understand their pain points and you guys are extremely aligned on the value proposition of the future as well as you actually allow them to play with the what you've built the features that you built so you can get feedback early on and get that validation early on before you even put it in front of a customer um the other thing is is that customers expect a very high touch like i said relationship orientation they want to be able to have that one-on-one meetings with you they want to be able to get demos ahead of time they want to get everything they want to have that white glove service that i don't think the b2c customers is expecting and then on top of that as products we all have bosses you know our company leadership the company leadership have a very high expectation um from product managers in terms of communication your communication has to convey you're basically representing the company at every time so you have to convey a level of credibility thought leadership a real keen understanding of what the business problems are and you have to be very comfortable to talk with all levels um of a particular business all right um so some key takeaways um you know like i said it's the differences are nuanced i think a lot of um a lot of what you have to do as a product manager uh in a b2c world is similar to what you have to do in the b2b world i mean it really really does come back to really understanding your industry really understanding your user and i don't think any b2c product manager would go into that job without actually understanding the company that they're operating in and what the company's looking to accomplish with the vision is what the competitive competitors are doing where the trajectory is but in the b2b world it is absolutely critical that you build up the industry knowledge to build to build credibility credibility is everything as a b2b product manager the second thing i would say is relationship building formal and informal you have to have very strong relationship building skills to the point where you almost have to see yourself as embedded in the company that they feel comfortable to reach out to you whenever there's a problem even if the problems is outside your domain expertise for example um how many times have customers reached out to me on a problem that they were having just in an anecdotal kind of way and we were able to come up with a solution for that that they weren't even conceiving of and that actually became you know the the starting point of a feature set that we actually rolled out to a whole bunch of other customers who had that same problem i can't even count the number of times that those features discussions came out of like anecdotal one-on-ones um and it's also very important not just externally but internally to build relationships um with your sales team with your customer success team i i would actually go as far as to say that one of the linchpins for product manager success is the ability to engage with the customer success team in addition to the sales customer success team they know the ins and outs of the customer and they're actually a really great resource for identifying detractors as well as evangelizers for your features so that you can include them in beta sessions and really dig deep to find out what the problem space is and then the third space is you need to put on the mindset of building a rigorous prioritization decision matrix for problem spaces as well as personas i think you should i think b2c uh product managers can kind of get away a little bit like they have a little bit of wiggle room in order to do this but the b2b world you actually have to map it out and i don't think you have a choice in order to successfully deliver digital products so with that um i think i'm going to bring our talk to a conclusion um i love product school i love what it stands for um i love you know all things product i consider myself a little bit of a product nerd um so happy to you know connect with people on linkedin feel free to reach out to me and thank you for taking the time you know to participate in this webinar [Music]