 When people jumpstart their product management career, they're frequently confused. What's the differences between B2B and B2C product? And which career paths should you choose? And how can they transfer between B2B to B2C? Or how can they jump between B2B to B2C product? In this video, I'm going to talk about the top three differences between B2B and B2C product so that you're able to decide which career path is best for you. I'm also going to cover lots of similarities between those two and people's age working on different type of product. Today until the end of this video, we're also going to give you the free job referral to top tier companies. Hey guys, this is Dr. Nancy Lee, a direct product and feature in Forbes. I've helped 1000 people land their dream PM job offer in fan companies and unicorns startup and continue to get promoted as a product leader. In this channel, we talk about tech trends and free product management training. Like and subscribe and check out our new video every Tuesday. First of all, let's talk about the similarities between B2B and B2C product using my personal product launch experience. Throughout my entire career, I have launched several award-winning B2B products and I also launched several B2C products as well as helping my students landing those B2C product job offers. Now specifically, the B2B products I've launched in the past are Smart Cities products using AI to reduce car crashes, which receive the Mayor's Best Practice Award. I also launched one of the most famous cloud products in the industry called Edge Computing products in collaboration with Amazon and Microsoft. From B2C side, I consider my own PM accelerator B2C product and also have advised lots of students working for meta-tech talk to grow their product career and help them create a product strategy for these B2C companies. I've also provided lots of product strategy and career advice for my students currently working for Google meta-tech talk and help them to figure out what is the new product strategy and features they need developed for their B2C product. So through all this product experience, I can confidently tell you that there are 70% similarities between B2B and B2C products in terms of scales you need to launch those products and the career path that's quite similar between those two products. For example, the 70% similarities include the following. For example, both B2B and B2C product managers need to lead without authority, the product discovery process always starts from customer interview. They also need to use agile methodology to develop and build very comprehensive products. They still need to work with sales and marketing teams to create the value proposition of their product, pricing strategies, and go-to-market strategies. I have another in-depth video where I talk about the top 6 PM skills everyone needs to master to become Outstanding Product Manager. You should check it out right here. Now, let's dive deeper regarding how exactly you can make transition. First of all, we do have seen a lot of success stories such as our student Amy Yu. She became a product manager at TikTok, but she came from a CPA background and worked on B2B's CPA accounting software, which I personally believe is such a big career transition and she loves her new job in TikTok as a creator PM, significantly more than accounting software PM. The way she made the transition is mainly focused on her transferable skills, which I mentioned earlier, and creating a product portfolio to help her grow her interest and demonstrate her capabilities of creating the B2C product and strong customer empathy. You should check out this video right here where I interviewed our student Amy, where she broke down her strategies moving into B2C space with a B2B and CPA background. I'm also on the link in the video in the description of this video. Now, here comes the age of different product managers working on different products. First of all, this is a trend in the industry. Let me know if you agree with me. I was told that if you are in your early 20s, you like to work on B2C products, especially dating apps. And in your mid 20s and late 20s, you start working on social media B2C, such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Once you move to your 30s, lots of people start to move into B2B space, such as enterprise product and healthcare product. Once you turn into 40s, you start to work on cloud B2B product, such as AWS and Azure, and those are infrastructure as a service or platform as a service product. Once you turn 50s, I heard people start to work on B2G product, which is business-to-government product. Unfortunately, I started my career going backwards. When I was in my early 20s, I worked on B2G product, and then in my late 20s, I started to work on B2B cloud product. Maybe once I turn 50s, I will start working on dating apps. Comment below if you agree with me regarding the age trend and the relation to different products. Let me know by commenting below. All these products have very similar roles and responsibilities, and to learn more about the ultimate guide to product management roles and responsibilities, feel free to check out this checklist and PDF guide I have created for all of you guys so you can dive deeper. You can download those three PDF in the description of this video. Now let's talk about the top three differences between B2B and B2C product. Number one, customer discovery phase. For B2C product, you will still do a lot of customer interviews, maybe 10, 20, 50 customer interviews. But given their large amount of B2C customers, they frequently introduce a large amount of surveys so they can hear thousands of people's response and see a trend. And whatever trend they receive, they are going to build new features to test out in those B2C apps, such as TikTok and Instagram. And then they're going to run AV testing to understand what kind of product features are actually working and improve the bottom line of the product and hit their North Star metric. However, for B2B product and their customer discovery process is completely different. They still start with customer interview. However, it's very hard to find those executives or whenever my smart cities product, I need to talk to mayors or chief traffic officers and for me to interview. So the number and volume of people I need to talk to reduce significantly when I work on B2B and B2G product. In this case, we frequently need to do a lot of deep dive with customer journey and create many different pilot programs with our early adopters so that we can have more insight information from our B2B customers. Inside the Prime Manager accelerator program, I talk a lot about eight different kinds of stakeholders in the B2B product management lifecycle. For example, there are gatekeepers, influencers, decision makers, among all eight people. When we contact with the customer interviews or even try to get access to those decision makers, we need to think about all eight different kinds of personalities when we try to grow and discover our product. Another way for B2B customers to collect customer feedback is through customer success team because they're already customers using existing product. They can talk to the customer success team to hear about customer's pain point and complain and turn into requirement and product features to solve the pain point of the customers. That's also one of the reasons we have several students such as Tina, she transitioned from customer success into product management. You can check more regarding my interview of her right here as well. The second type of differences is product lifecycle difference. For B2C product is actually extremely fast launch product features, test out new features and also kill product features. For example, if you had tried out TikTok, TikTok has done different kind of experiment with different users. For my TikTok app, even if currently only have 100 subscribers on TikTok, make sure to follow me on TikTok. But TikTok still have a customer's tab for me, not just typical for you and popular tab. I have special tab cost dam feature. This tab is only available for customer segmentations like me, even if I only have 100 followers on TikTok. However, some of my other students, they have a tab called music that specialize for that person. So TikTok is actually trying to do experiment among different type of users to figure out how can they maintain the user attention and keep them safe on the platform for a very long time. So they're rapidly developing new features, test it out and kill those features all the time. For B2B product, it's actually very difficult to test with your early adopters because there are only maybe two early adopters, sometimes only one early adopters. How would you run large numbers of A-B testing to figure this out? The way we do this is that we always invite early adopters. And when early adopters use different product features, we try to ask lots of questions and watch user behavior. Even there's only a few users on our platform. We're going to collect lots of data for their user behavior on our platform and work with our early adopters to launch and test out different new features. But whenever we test this out, we always communicate ahead of time instead of just doing blind A-B testing like TikTok, test on all the users today. But those early adopters for B2B product are frequently companies have great relationship with our customers. But those B2B early adopters are frequently have great relationship with the customers. So therefore, whenever we make some mistakes, they're more tolerant. And but they're very happy to provide us feedback. That's why B2B product management have a different approach to manage end-to-end product management lifecycle. And the time for us to develop new features is relatively longer compared with B2B product. Third is go-to-market strategy differences. For B2C product, they have a variety of ways to launch a new product. For example, they can run ads, they can run influencer campaign, they also can push notification to existing users. They can also acquire new customers through collaborations. Let me give you specific examples. When YouTube trying to launch the podcast feature, they send me the existing users many emails and incentivize me to create a podcast. When they try to push the membership features on YouTube, they also pays me $1,000 as a cash award as long as I start my membership program on YouTube. So therefore, with YouTube's incentives, I start to launch my own product insider podcasts and post them on YouTube. And I also turn the audio version of my podcast and launch on Spotify and Apple. And you can start listening to those when you're driving to work and just search product insider podcasts by Dr. Nancy Lee. When TikTok tried to enter the U.S. market a few years ago, they spent lots of money on running ads, quickly getting lots of momentum in the market. And even right now, they're still running ads to acquire new customers. Influencer campaigns also won the best strategies for B2C product to acquire customers. That's why lots of company proactive reach out to me and other YouTubers and try to sponsor our YouTube content. However, majority of the above strategies is not applicable for B2B product. B2B product requires a lot of business development when they launch the product. It also requires lots of relationship building with the early adopters and turn the success stories as testimonial and acquire more customers. They also have different kind of sales model. For example, when I launched my award-winning AI Empower Smart Cities product, we're able to use the sales through model. So the way able to access the third-party city planning agency to sell our Smart Cities product to the city. For my edge computing decentralized cloud product in collaboration with Amazon and Microsoft, the way we go to market is by sponsoring developer hackathon. So organizing event and speaking on conferences to get access in front of all the developer who are our target customers. So therefore, when you try to launch your unique product, you must understand where is your customers, what best value can add to your customers when you design your go-to-market strategy and also think about the internal resources and always take the lower hand food to start launch and capture your first customer. By now, I saw product management is easy, but there are huge differences depending on how you create a award-winning product and what specific strategies you use for a different product. So make sure to download the PDF guide. We'll talk about the ultimate guide to different roles and responsibilities as a product manager for all different kind of product in the industry. I'm also going to put it in the description of this video. And April is the primary recruiting season. We literally have a lot of tier one companies such as TikTok, crypto companies and AI companies reach out to us to share the job openings and refer candidates for free for them. If interested in getting those free referrals, please comment in the description of this video. We're going to send you instructions regarding how to connect with the hiring manager. After you start and grow your career, you're probably thinking what exactly I will be in the long run? I'm going to be a chief product officer. I'm going to be an entrepreneur. Make sure to watch this video where I break down different steps and career paths of product managers so they can plan ahead of time. If you find this video helpful, make sure to like, subscribe and share. This is Dr. NCD from PM Accelerator.io. I'm going to see you in my next video right here.