Building Products for the Enterprise

Preface

If you’re new to software product management, or just looking to learn more about it, you might naturally do a search on the web on the topic. Brew some coffee first, though, because you’ll get a lot of stuff back. Some of it will be good; some kind of interesting but incomplete; and a large swath of it, frankly, will be clickbait claptrap. (In other words, a pretty typical breakdown on tech industry topics.) Over the years, Ben and I have taken to sending each other links to particularly egregious examples of bad or amateurish product management advice that we stumble across. One thing we’ve noticed is that even the “good stuff” is usually geared toward the startup community and consumer tech world, which isn’t where we live. (Literally—neither of us lives in Silicon Valley, either.) As a result, as product managers in enterprise software, we’ve mostly had to figure this stuff out for ourselves.

Enterprise software often seems to live in its own separate universe. This isn’t the frothy, startup-VC-industrial complex whirlwind that’s covered breathlessly by the tech press. There’s a narrative on that side that sometimes suggests that the huge firms that dominate the enterprise market are back on their heels, scrambling to compete with nimbler VC-funded startups that are eating their lunch. Indeed, the joke goes that the VC/startup culture loves to bash “BigCos.” Until, that is, a favored startup wants an acquisition. Indeed, the market reality is something quite different than that narrative implies. As of 2014, a group of 10 companies generated 45% of all global revenue in the enterprise software segment. In fact, just five companies—Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, and Symantec—generated 38% of that revenue. Just two companies on that same list, Salesforce (#9) and Google (#20), have been founded in the past 25 years. Make no mistake: the overall enterprise software business is very healthy and growing fast, even while undergoing huge changes, like adapting to cloud service delivery and subscription-based pricing models. The enormous growth of enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) into today’s de facto default model for enterprise software represents the culmination of these trends.

Your authors, Ben (Adobe, #11 on the list) and Blair (SAS, #13) have spent our entire tech careers at the forefront of that very shift to the world of enterprise SaaS. The software world we live in is not the hypergrowth, boom-and-bust cycle that we so often see on the consumer side. It’s a market of slow ramps, one negotiated sale after another, repeated successful execution, demonstrated business value and organizational collaboration, all sustained over time. Startups are relevant mainly as potential acquisitions, not so often as meaningful competitors. What the startups call their “enterprise” tier is frequently our small-to-mid-sized segment, or even too small an account size for us to touch. This isn’t hyperbole, it’s just the reality we face in our day-to-day jobs.

Much of the prevailing wisdom about product management in our industry today is derived from lessons learned from the 2000–2008 tech cycle, reapplied to the subsequent one that we’re in now. In that era, “hypergrowth” Silicon Valley firms like Google and then Facebook transformed from startups into the giants they are today, and the resulting diaspora of investors and alumni have evangelized the product lessons learned at both companies around the Valley. In particular, Google’s Associate Product Manager (“APM”) program alone is credited with defining much of today’s conventional product wisdom in tech. Product management as a function existed prior to all of this, of course (Microsoft has had its equivalent “program managers” for decades), but it took this cycle of the tech industry’s mega-growth for product managers to become a standard feature of software product development.

Yet the more we talked about it, the more we began to agree that there was a real and growing gap between what we read about “PM” in the typical tech circles and what our jobs actually looked like building software products for businesses. Upon examination, we trace this back to the big fundamental business model differences between consumer and enterprise software. The leaders of product at Google, Facebook, and other consumer-facing companies have an awful lot of wisdom, but much of it simply isn’t applicable to what we do. The challenges we face in enterprise software are meaningfully unique, and deserve their own dedicated treatment. So that’s what we aim to do in this book.

Your authors are both operators. We are both full-time enterprise product managers—not consultants, professional speakers, or “thought leader” VCs. In our day jobs, we figure out how to build amazing cloud software products for some of the biggest and most impactful and influential industries on earth. Some of our products have almost certainly touched your life in some way. We both love our jobs, and feel like we’ve learned some stuff that other enterprise product managers, and those who are curious about a gig like ours, might be able to use. So, one unseasonably warm winter night over dinner, we decided that we’d write a book that gave our “insider’s” perspective on enterprise product management, and…well, here we are.

This book is for product managers in enterprise software, both those doing the gig now or those who might be interested in getting into enterprise product management in the future. Fair warning: we do not have all the answers, and we don’t pretend to. That’s also a theme you’ll see us return to in this book, so take it to heart. The tech industry is a rapidly changing place, and we know all too well that there’s no one, true way to do product management. But we’ve learned some stuff that has worked for us, and we’ve learned some stuff that absolutely has not. We’re going to push back on some of the hype and airy abstractions of “product,” pop a few of the myths you’ve heard about, and try to give some practical, straightforward guidance that we hope will be helpful to you. We’re going to cover, for example, how we decide what products or features to build, how we build a roadmap, how we organize a product team, how we work with other key teams in our organizations, and much more.

We’ve organized this book into the following, sometimes broad, chapters:

Chapter 1, Why Product Management in the Enterprise Is Different

What prompted us to write this book was noticing that product management is often discussed in terms that don’t really work for those of us in enterprise software. Building software for companies rather than consumers introduces dramatic differences into how our products are planned, designed, built, managed, sold, and distributed, all of which makes our jobs as product managers meaningfully different than for our consumer-facing colleagues.

Chapter 2, Who Are We Building For?

We start with a fundamental clarification of user problems versus customer problems. These are different people, and grasping their respective needs is our currency as product managers.

Chapter 3, Three Types of Knowledge for a Product Manager to Seek

The best way we know to categorize the right domains of practical competence for an enterprise product manager are as organizational, product, and industry knowledge.

Chapter 4, Organizational Knowledge

How enterprise product managers should aim to work with other internal teams, like development, design, marketing, sales, and executives.

Chapter 5, Product Knowledge

How enterprise product managers should approach their product planning process: the product life cycle, building the roadmap, gathering customer input, and measuring success.

Chapter 6, Building Better Products with Data

Product managers often have innumerable sources of data about their products. How to sift through it all to determine which parts are actionable, and in what way?

Chapter 7, Industry Knowledge

How enterprise product managers should understand their market or the context for everything they build. Learn about your market from primary data, third parties, your colleagues and, most of all, the customers themselves.

Chapter 8, The Product Managers

How to get into product management, managing product teams, and making sure you continue to grow in the role.

In addition, we’ve also enjoyed the great privilege of interviewing several of our outstanding peers in enterprise product management, across a range of companies, to get their perspectives on the challenges of building software products in our industry. We’ve included these “PM Profiles” at the end of each chapter. And we’re not finished! Since publication, we’ve continued to seek out perspectives from leading enterprise product managers, and we’ll be publishing new ones periodically at our book website: BuildingForBusiness.com.

We also readily admit (and revisit this in our conclusion) that the way companies make decisions about product strategy, roadmap, and go-to-market are much more complex and diverse than what we can comprehensively cover in these pages. As you read, you might find yourself thinking, “All of this sounds great, but it would never happen that way here.” That might be true. Figuring out how to adapt and work these principles into your current organization can be a challenge, but we’ve seen many product managers begin to implement these ideas, here and there, even in companies with heavy internal inertia. If nothing else, we hope we’ve given you a way to ask, “Why aren’t we doing it this way?” and begin an honest conversation with your peers and management about how you can improve your product focus. The one thing we do not want is for you to read this book and become discouraged by the chasm between what we describe and where you think your team currently is. Even in your current situation, we believe you can do great things for your customers. So, hey, keep your head up!

If you don’t work in enterprise software, we think you’ll still be able to take something useful away from this book. Consumer web businesses often operate very differently than we do in enterprise, in ways that have big implications for how product management is done. That, of course, is the genesis of this book. Yet clearly recognizing the differences between these segments can help each better understand itself.

And if you do work in the enterprise market, welcome. We’re part of the same tribe. We understand your goals and, in all likelihood, share them. If you see stuff we’ve missed in here, we’d love to hear from you. Like we said, we’re still learning, too.

Onward.

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Acknowledgments

No product manager does it alone, even when “it” is writing a book. We are grateful for the support and guidance of dozens who made Building Products for the Enterprise possible. First, we’d like to thank the O’Reilly team: Nikki McDonald, Angela Rufino, Nan Barber, Meg Foley, and everyone else who guided two newbies through the publication process (successfully, if you are reading this). We are indebted to our outstanding review team, which offered countless suggestions to make this text more valuable to you (and also made sure we are not lying to you about how to build great software); this team included product veterans Matt LeMay, Ryan Harper, Sachin Agarwal, Kimen Warner, and Jeremy Horn. We were thrilled and appreciative to have Todd Olson write us the foreword that starts this book off right. This book would not have been possible without Matt LeMay providing general inspiration to us in his book, Product Management in Practice: A Real-World Guide to the Key Connective Role of the 21st Century, also available from O’Reilly Media.

Blair Reeves: I’ve had the opportunity to work with and learn from a great many brilliant and hard-working people, without whose influence this book would not have been possible. The first is the most obvious: I want to thank Ben, who, in addition to being the brains of this operation, is a terrific writer and product manager from whom I have learned a great deal. I’d like to thank many of my old managers for the lessons and experiences, both the easy and hard ones, that have led up to this book—in particular, Chris Benedetto, Alan Bunce, Mike Niemann and Barbara Stilwell. I wish to thank my wife, Laura, for her help keeping me on track, and my dog, Abby, for her reliable looks of faithful encouragement. Lastly, I want to thank our daughter, Penny, whose due date provided the hard deadline I needed to finish this book.

Ben Gaines: This whole thing was Blair’s idea, and without him there is no way this book would have happened. He constantly amazes me with the depth and breadth of his knowledge. Thanks also to members of the Adobe team who provided input on specific topics in the book: Jordan Walker, Brandon George, and Michael Malmgren. The rest of the Adobe product teams—far too many individuals to name—contributed extensively to the long-accrued knowledge and experience that went into much of this book, and I am nothing if not grateful for my teammates (current and former) for their wisdom and support. I’ll mention specifically those who have managed me directly during my time in product management, each of whom has been an outstanding teacher and mentor: J.D. Nyland, Bret Gundersen, and Chris Wareham. Last but certainly not least, thank you to my wife, Toni, for her constant encouragement, patience, and love; and to Anna, Eliza, Calvin, and Becca, who are the greatest creations I will ever be a part of.