Building Products for the Enterprise

Foreword

Product management is hot! Why? A lot of reasons, not the least of which is the growing primacy of product, where many of our sources of modern competitive advantage are found in products that utterly delight customers. But I also credit Google and the wildly successful product management organization it has built. Perhaps without equal, Google has hired and trained wicked smart people who built some of the most recognizable and delightful products we all know and use. Many are now CEOs or venture capitalists—the power brokers in our current technology ecosystem. Much of the content around product management is driven by this hallowed community. I’m fortunate to work closely with two individuals with this pedigree and have encountered many more, and I’m qualified to say they are the real deal.

Yet, their background is different than mine. Google is a consumer-first company—at least in its early days. Some Google product managers have interacted with sales, but many have not. Much of the idealism that I read about is inspiring to me, yet it doesn’t reflect the reality that I’ve faced trying to be successful in my past. Not all of us live in a world where we can A/B test something in Google search and get millions of datapoints in an hour.

The reality is that enterprise or B2B product management is its own beast. And it’s an important one. Enterprise product management is driving our economy. We are designing the future of our human resources departments, our supply chain, ...