How to build a successful B2B product organization
In the realm of B2B product management, success hinges upon your ability to stay ahead of the curve, align your strategies with customer needs, and leverage emerging trends to drive growth. To achieve this, it is crucial for B2B product teams to master seven key disciplines that lay the foundation for success.
Each discipline plays a vital role in ensuring that your B2B product team is equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge to navigate the complex landscape of B2B product management. By mastering these disciplines, you can increase your chances of delivering successful products, staying competitive, and meeting the evolving needs of your target market.
Let’s explore these disciplines in detail and understand why they are important for the success of your B2B product team.
1. Outcome orientation
a B2B product organization, the primary objective is to build products that drive business growth, plain and simple. This entails creating products that generate new revenue streams, facilitate upselling or cross-selling opportunities, and improve customer retention.
Additionally, optimizing product costs can contribute to enhancing overall profitability. While building and enhancing products, it is essential to prioritize customer satisfaction and ensure they can derive maximum value from your solution. However, all these efforts must ultimately serve the end goal of driving business growth.
To achieve this, the product teams need to be fully aligned with the company’s growth objectives at any given time. Whether the focus is on acquiring new revenue or improving customer retention, all product efforts should be oriented towards these specific goals. It is critical for a mature B2B organization to shift its product management approach from a feature-driven mindset to an outcome-driven one. Instead of solely delivering a product, the product team must have a deep understanding of which aspects will impact revenue or profitability and measure their impact accordingly. This outcome orientation should be embraced by every member of the product team, as each individual PM is responsible for contributing to the growth of their specific area. As a product leader, it is your responsibility to ensure that every product manager is clear on the desired outcome goals and is working towards achieving them.
By adopting an outcome-oriented approach, B2B product organizations can focus their efforts and resources on initiatives that directly contribute to business growth. This strategic alignment ensures that each product decision and action has a measurable impact, helping the organization achieve its revenue objectives.
2. Product Sense
Having a strong product sense is crucial for effective B2B product management. It involves developing a deep understanding of your target market, including their needs, preferences, and behaviors. Without this clarity, it is impossible to build a product that truly resonates with your customers and addresses their pain points.
A product team with exceptional product sense possesses a keen understanding of the frustrations and challenges faced by their customers and users. They possess a thorough grasp of the personas, use cases and journey maps enabling them to make informed decisions about feature prioritization and product enhancements.
Moreover, teams with strong product sense are not only attuned to customer needs but also possess a keen sense of design aesthetics. They strive to delight their customers by creating intuitive and visually appealing user experiences. Furthermore, mature product management organizations have a solid grasp of key metrics, both leading and lagging. They establish clear success indicators and continuously measure and analyze the impact of their product initiatives. By constantly experimenting, iterating, and acting on the insights derived from data, they drive continuous improvement and make data-informed decisions.
In essence, product sense encompasses a comprehensive understanding of customer pain points, the ability to design delightful experiences, and a data-driven approach to decision-making. By honing their product sense, B2B product teams can build products that truly make a difference and exceed customer expectations.
3. Execution
Strategy and planning are essential, but they must be accompanied by impeccable execution. It’s not enough to have a brilliant product concept; it must also reach the market and end up in the hands of customers. To achieve this, your product development processes should be streamlined, efficient, and agile.
Collaboration becomes paramount. Work closely with engineering and other teams to transform your product vision into reality, managing timelines, resources, and dependencies effectively. By ensuring a smooth collaboration, you can navigate potential obstacles, identify bottlenecks, and make necessary adjustments to keep projects on track. Emphasize regular progress tracking to stay aligned with project goals and deliver high-quality products to the market.
But effective execution doesn’t stop at delivering features. It encompasses a broader scope, including launch readiness, support readiness, training, communication, and documentation. As a product manager, it is your responsibility to oversee these aspects and ensure that your product is fully prepared for a successful market entry.
By prioritizing flawless execution, B2B organizations can go beyond meeting customer needs; they can drive growth and establish a robust position in the demanding B2B marketplace. Effective execution is the bridge that connects strategy to tangible results, enabling the delivery of products that truly make an impact on customers and the business as a whole.
4. Alignment
Successful B2B product management requires close alignment with various stakeholders, including sales, marketing, engineering, and executive leadership. Establishing clear communication channels and fostering cross-functional collaboration is vital to ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals. Regular alignment meetings, shared objectives, and a common understanding of the product strategy will help create a cohesive and effective team.
The last thing you want is that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. Every activity such as demand gen, marketing, sales, training, documentation needs to be aligned with the product. This is a job that the product team should not overlook.
Look for signals like “I don’t know what the product team is upto” or “Product team has no clue what they need to build” or worse “We don’t have a good product team”.
5. Voice of the Customer (VOC)
Voice of customer is a fancy term to say that we listen and gather feedback from customers in a structured way, and influence our product strategy. Customer feedback provides insights into their pain points, preferences, and expectations. Use these inputs to inform your product roadmap, prioritize features, and continuously improve the customer experience. Regularly soliciting and incorporating customer feedback helps build a customer-centric product that meets real-world needs.
The challenge in most B2B orgs is to create a repeatable and manageable process and handle the barrage of inputs. Having a framework and structure in place is critical. This is often a neglected area in many orgs. Customer feedback comes from a variety of sources.
Here are some common sources that I have experienced.
Support
Support agents are at the front line and have a good grasp on the issues customer face. They are a valuable source of finding patterns of problems and new requests from customers. I highly recommend a regular weekly cadence of product and support team where they discuss patterns and disseminate information back to customers. This is not a forum to share product roadmap per se. Rather, if a customer requests a new feature, then at the least acknowledge and at the most tell them a rough time frame or approach. It’s also a good place to arm the support team so they can field most of the issues with customers. Support can tell what issues take longer or require engineering escalations.
Customer success and onboarding
Similar to support, customer success also receive first hand input. Typically, CSM schedule regular cadences of customer calls where they help customers with any questions, show progress on value. Customers also share their frustrations. Specifically, onboarding teams are a great resource as they can point out any friction points as customers are getting started.
(Similarly sales also provide inputs as they provide demos and also understand the key pain points and objections from customer.)
Direct Customer input
PMs can also receive direct input from customers in 1:1 sessions or business review sessions (commonly called QBR for quarterly business reviews). If you work for a large company, then you likely have an annual conference where customers come in to learn and connect. This is a great opportunity to gather first hand feedback.
Surveys
Surveys also provide a good source of inputs for general customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Use them to get the general direction of your product but drill down to specific reasons
Webinars and events
Peer review sites
Social
There is of course a ton of discourse on social channels like Linked, Twitter, Reddit. Most of it is noise but occasionally you will find useful bits of information that might need further investigation. In B2B contexts, this may be less important but companies with large customer base should keep a tab on the signals. You want to know how is your brand is being perceived.
Make a system to gather and analyze the feedback continuously. It’s not important that you have a plan to build, but more important that you have read the feedback and placed into a bucket of priorities. In some cases you may want to respond back tot he customer e.g. if they provided feedback in a QBR session. Or if they opened a bug or new feature request
6. Competition
In a mature B2B market, competition is fierce. Stay informed about your competitors, their offerings, and their strategies. Conduct competitive analyses to identify your unique value proposition and differentiate your product. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, you can make informed decisions about positioning, pricing, and feature development, giving your product a competitive edge.
Work with sales operations to do regular win loss analysis. Where are we losing deals and why? Most often it’s not the product but positioning of the value.
The common adage is to focus on customers and not on competition. That’s true. But your competitors are doing the same – focussing on their customers. So if their messaging or positioning is better, you will lose. Rather than copying your competition’s features, find the messaging they are using to get customers, and beat that. Marketing and communications plays an important role but it is the PM who needs to keep tabs on the “what”.
You don’t need to focus on all competitors. Just the key one’s that are playing in your ideal customer segment. For example, there are about 100 competitors in email marketing, but perhaps you only focus on the top 2-3 who regularly win deals in your target market.
7. Industry and Technology Trends
Finally, being aware of industry trends and emerging technologies is essential for B2B product managers. Industry and technology constantly evolve. As a PM, you have to keep up with the trends or your product will either stagnate or perish. Worse, competition can get take advantage of trends and move ahead.
In my first startup all our data visualizations were in Flash technology. Then the iPhone came which would not render flash. So we had to change directions to HTML5. In regulated industries such as health care, it is important to keep a tab on laws and regulations. Certain industries are still evolving such as crypto and generative AI (as of this writing), and all eyes should be on how the industry is going to shape up.
Staying ahead of the industry trends will help your product stay ahead in the market. AS a PM team, you should do a quarterly review of your industry and discuss internally, and see if there are headwinds that you need to get ahead of
Conclusion
Some of these disciplines such as outcome orientation, product sense and execution are non negotiable. They are a must. Others depend on various factors. If you are in a competitive environment then having a good handle on your competitors are important. If you are in an industry where winds can change the direction of your company, then you need to keep a close tab on the industry and technological trends.
It is critical to have a structure and roles in place to address these disciplines. By mastering these, you can position yourself and your organization for sustained success in a competitive B2B landscape and drive growth, deliver customer value, and stay ahead in a dynamic and competitive market.
