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 ...