Building Products for the Enterprise

Chapter 1. Why Product Management in the Enterprise Is Different

Even if you’re a seasoned product manager, from the business model to the meaning of the word “customer,” building products for companies is substantially different than building products for consumers. Here’s why.

Product is hot. If you pay attention to the tech industry at all, you know what we’re talking about. “Product manager” is one of the most highly-coveted job titles for new MBA graduates. Entire blogs, newsletters, conferences, even boot camps have sprung up around the tech world catering to people interested in the topic. Try putting “product manager” in your LinkedIn profile, and get ready to see a steady uptick in your recruiter spam. There is, in fact, a whole content and social network called Medium dedicated solely to sharing product management thinkpieces.

Yet we still have difficulty explaining to our parents what we do for a living. Neat summaries or the kind of pithy clichés (“the product manager is like a mini CEO!”) you often see are either silly or, at best, very incomplete. We’re not engineers. Nor are we marketers. We’re certainly not “CEOs of the product.” But we’re the guys who everyone else looks to when there’s a question about our products, or “how it’s doing,” or “what it needs” or “what [it/we] need to do next.” And we better have a good answer for those questions, because we’re ultimately the only guys whose responsibility it is to know.

In a mature, high-functioning software business, ...