Building Products for the Enterprise

Chapter 9. Conclusion

Well, that’s it. That’s what we know about enterprise product management. Kinda.

As we said at the very beginning, we set out to describe what we believe are the ideal principles that could be applied to most enterprise software businesses. Above all else, please don’t become discouraged if your company seems very far from what we’ve described here! Product management is difficult enough without a couple of book authors telling you that you’re doing it all wrong. These are ideals, and they’re far from reality even for many of the best product teams, so whatever you do, don’t add the burden of perfectionism to your role. You can still do great things to delight and empower your customers. You can still become a great product manager for enterprise software. And you can help your company in big ways by slowly, carefully implementing some of what we’ve described here. Change often happens slowly in enterprise software, and our goal here was to give you a few places to begin.

One of the most difficult parts about writing this book was trying to distill all the sprawling branches of our respective experiences into well-organized, consumable sections that we hoped you would find easily usable. In doing that streamlining, we left out a lot of stuff that just didn’t fit anywhere very cleanly. We also ran into even more enterprise product managers whose stories and experiences we wanted to share in profiles like the ones you’ve read here. So following publication, ...