Building Products for the Enterprise

Chapter 7. Industry Knowledge

Product managers cannot help design the future of the product without knowing where their industry is currently, as well as where it is headed. Fortunately, you will have many tools at your disposal to gain this knowledge: most important, insights gleaned from working directly with your customers in a number of ways.

Although we have not talked much about them so far in this book, we will admit that there are some ways in which product management for enterprise software might arguably be easier than in consumer technology. We’re going to discuss one such example in this chapter: gaining an understanding of your target market. Of the three types of knowledge discussed in this chapter, industry/market knowledge is the one that both new and experienced product managers in an industry will need to continually strive to obtain, especially given the pace of technological change in most industries.

Consumer technology has its addressable segments, of course. But even so, at large scale there is a tremendous diversity in the kinds of use cases normal technology consumers have. In enterprise software this is still a problem, but is somewhat easier to overcome. Businesses in the same industry tend to share many characteristics in common: how they sell; what types of products they sell; how they source, produce, and distribute those goods; and so forth. Knowing a lot about how an industry works gives an enterprise product manager very valuable insight into what ...