 Hey everyone, today we are going to talk about product management and how product management differs between a B2B product and B2C product. So yeah, thanks everyone for joining for this session and I look forward to share my knowledge and insights with you on this topic. So what we're going to start with is really talk about what is a B2B product first and what is a B2C product and really just starting off with a definition before we dive deeper into what are the differences, what are the similarities, are they even too different from each other when it comes to product management. So a little bit about me, I have been doing product management for about a decade now. I started on consumer side of the house managing Black Friday experience for Delft e-commerce experience. I also built their account management experience on consumer side, eventually moved on to do B2B for large enterprise products such as building enterprise APIs so that we can support submitting of purchase orders or providing shipping notifications to large enterprises when they make large purchases. I also dealt with medium businesses when I built their checkout experience and so on. Most recently, I've been a product manager on Alexa smart home front with Amazon so kind of going back to my roots on consumer front. So let's talk about B2B product, what is a B2B product? At the very core of it, it's really just a business model that focuses on selling products or services to other companies. So when we look at examples of such companies, like you can think of Salesforce, ServiceNow, you can think of LinkedIn as well with what they provide to the recruiter and employer side of the house and everyone's most favorite paper company, Dunder Mifflin, if any of you are there are office fans, they too are considered a B2B company having selling paper products to other companies. When we talk about B2C product, this is something that most of you would have experienced on your day to day life really prefers to selling products and services to the consumers and the end users happen to be the recipient of whatever product or services the company may have to offer. So we can think of Snapchat, Electronic Arts with their gaming products, Tinder or even Mint with their financial products. So with that behind us really just the definition of what a B2B product is and how does it differ from B2C as far as definition is concerned, we can now just start talking about the customer base. How do the customer base differ between these two? So on B2B front really you are talking about CIOs who end up deciding which enterprise software to use in a company like do I want my company to use Google G Suite or do I want them to use Office 365. You have got procurement manager, they are responsible for deciding how much to procure, what to procure and so on really just working closely with the next person which happens to be finance manager. You may also be working with an IT architect or engineer in your customer's company especially when it comes to helping them decide what's the right product, what's the right solution set. This is where for example AWS comes in picture and a lot of the decisions being made about what of those services and products are to be used is decided by engineers and more of developer persona. Lastly you have end users as well who may eventually end up using your product for example like if the CIO or procurement manager decides to use Microsoft 365 or Office 365 in your company, you could consider that the end user is actual employee who is using like Outlook or Word or other Office products. Now when we look at B2C on the other hand really the decision maker is the user right so as we were talking about B2B products where the CIO happens to make a decision or a procurement manager happens to make a decision along with finance manager while end user really gets to use the product. On B2C front as you can imagine decision maker and user are really the same personas. They happen to be largely role agnostic. Of course you can tailor your product to a specific demographic and specific persona of people but largely speaking traditionally you would have B2C products that are role agnostic and rather profession agnostic as well. Next let's talk about customer needs right how do they differ when it comes to B2B versus B2C products right so on B2B front it's largely relationship based. You would have a lot of decisions being made based on relationship trying to decide okay I am going to use the software for next 10 years and this is the kind of investment I want to make so that my employees or others can get the most out of the B2B product so it just happens to be a lot more relationship based between the sales people in your company or product owners in your company and actual enterprise customers. You do end up depending a lot more on industry insights like for example if you have built a B2B product suite for automobile industry right so you would end up having to depend a lot more on okay what's going on with automobile industry where do they need the most help what kind of product solutions features and services to be built for them. And lastly you also depend a lot more on identifying process maps and how do you help customers simplify the same with your products or services. In contrast when you look at B2C like it's largely data driven you do end up depending a lot more on what's happening at micro level sometimes micro but mostly micro level with your product trying to make right decision in terms of what's the right path forward to daily optimized experience. As opposed to industry insights you would be largely dependent upon aggregated user insights in terms of most of your in terms of what your most users are doing with your product and it's also experimental right so for example like on Alexa front you would have you would have a new feature that says Alexa should be able to do this or that you can then let your customers really see how the experience is you can really test out if we introduce new friction or if the if the virtual assistant did what she was supposed to and really make the right decision as to do we really globalize the feature do we add more features to it and so on. So really you end up getting to be more experimental with B2C products while on B2B front you really want to make sure that you are very much in tune with what your customer wants to do what they're really trying to solve for and really just go after those unique set of use cases for whatever industry or segment that you are serving. Now let's talk about product decisions right how how do how do we really make decisions when it comes to managing a B2B product as a product manager and B2C right so on on B2B front you would depend a lot more on customer feedback right so let's say you own a B2B product suite you've got like 20 large enterprises in your account as your customers a lot of your roadmap decisions a lot of your feature decisions will really come out of the fact that okay customer A says this is the set of processes that is broken and this is where I need your help so customer feedback kind of takes a front seat when it comes to managing B2B products because that's what really what you're trying to solve for those 20 accounts in this example. Next is of course product teams ideas and decisions can come out of product teams right after that when it comes to B2B product competitors is the third one in that sequence really trying to make sure that okay if there is a competitive advantage that we can have on our product that will bring more enterprise customers to my B2B product than that aspect to ends up driving a lot of product decisions and lastly internal suggestions this is where your procurement manager or your sales people will come to you and say hey if you give me feature A or feature B I'll be able to sell more or these six of my customers really want us to build this feature can we really make it part of our roadmap and those internal suggestions end up playing a huge role in collaboration with of course customer feedback to to drive your product decisions. On B2C front really yeah your product teams end up making a lot of decisions in terms of what are the right feature sites how do we really prioritize it really measuring impact that okay if we were to build feature A prior to feature B or if we were to be prioritized feature B completely what kind of impact will we have in terms of the KPIs that you really care about internal suggestions also take a huge role in product decisions on B2C front this happens to be your stakeholders or your engineers or your designers and so on and then of course competitors as well and lastly customer feedback the reason why kind of customer feedback is still important on B2C front is because you want to stay close to qualitative feedback so that you can really pad it up with your quantitative insights and build the right things but in terms of customer feedback on B2C front you end up having to again look at like aggregated qualitative feedback to go after the right things in prioritized manner so like this is this is a rough idea around like where do the product ideas come from on B2B front and on B2C front as you can see like customer feedback given B2B is more relationship driven product management you do end up depending a lot more on customer feedback and really diving deeper into the same on B2C front as we discussed product teams end up getting to make a lot of decisions try and make sure that they are really really solving for the customer main points next is ROI decisions right when it comes to really monetizing a B2B product versus B2C product right so on B2B front it really depends upon organization really adopting your product or feature for example if you launched let's say a brand new email campaign service right now the email campaign service has to be adopted by X number of enterprises to be able to say that okay we are really getting returns on our investment when we build this product we are able to monetize it or not so it really depends upon really organizations or companies or enterprises saying that yeah I do see value in this product and I do want to adopt it so that like thousands of my employees can really benefit out of it it is most likely a pre-monitized product to an extent unless you are building something brand new which has never been done before but in general let's say you are building a SaaS product and that has been approved market for something like that you can go into the market with a pre-monitized point of view and say hey I'm going to sell it for this value annually to be able to really make up for my investment and then you end up depending a lot more on support and services and subscriptions as well especially if it's a harder product you end up going out to provide necessary support if it happens if it happens to be a software product you do get to really refresh their licenses and so on to be able to truly monetize all new features that you add on top of your existing products and then lastly it could likely be a tiered pricing in B2B case especially if you are serving a generalized industry you really want a tiered price based on like the size of the company that you are really serving so B2B products are likely to have tiered pricing on B2C front like unlike B2B which is largely dependent upon organizing or organizations adopting it B2C is really all about really your customers adopting it you really finding a right marketing challenge to reach out to these customers and have them use your product for example like you could do I don't know Instagram ads to be able to sell your app and get people to download it more and really drive adoption you can monetize it at launch depends on what kind of model you go after but if you really want to get a feel of how really customers are interacting with it are they liking it or not should you drive any improvement or not you can do monetization after the launch really after getting the feedback in terms of really different models you could go after just serving ads keeping your application free and really generate monetization out of ads you can do premium model as well and lastly subscription applies to B2C as well B2C product could have flat pricing but it can also have tiered pricing depending upon what you are really trying to sell like if you were to look at a few examples right so on B2C front you've got like Google GC in this case you can see you've got tiered pricing really based on like number of users per month that are going to use the GC product and that really drives the monetization strategy and so on on B2C front you've got an example of headspace right that happens to help you meditate through an app like you can see there is a tiered subscription pricing there as well so it really depends upon what kind of market you are serving what kind of monetization strategy works for you and really optimizing the pricing of your services to meet the customer needs. Let's talk product deliveries right and how product deliveries really differ between these two disciplines so on B2B front you've got largely longer iteration cycles especially if you are serving large enterprises with complex process maps you end up having to tweak and fine tune a lot more so that you are not building a product just for one customer so it ends up taking a lot more time to make sure that whatever features and services and applications that you are building is applicable and useful across the segment that you are really serving with your B2B product in comparison as you could guess on B2C front you could have shorter iteration cycles especially in relation to the experiments you may run so like it's quite possible you launch a tiny feature run an experiment do a b testing and figure out okay this performs better than this recipe and then really do another launch to go after the optimized experience on B2B front you are largely like customer roadmap dependent it's quite possible that you may build a product but customer may not have their engineering capacity or any bandwidth to really adopt your features or services for example let's say you built an enterprise API so that your customer can submit orders from their portal or transactions from their portal now you could build all the APIs that you really want to offer but if your customer doesn't have the bandwidth or capacity to do the integration work do the work on that front to really use your products and features then yeah you would have adoption challenges so B2B product is largely customer roadmap dependent as well what you do want to do is really before really building a feature or as you are building the feature you want to be in constant touch with your customers really honing into the relationship based product model as I was referring to earlier and really ask the questions that hey if you were to build this feature in this timeline you think you would have available capacity or a bandwidth to really adopt these features and then for the reasons I described your adoption cycle could be longer right like out of your 100 enterprise customers and of them could come through and say yes we like this feature and we are going to adopt it in the year that you launched it well like rest of the customers may come to you and say hey can you add few more features before we can adopt it or some customers may come to you and say hey we cannot do it this year but we really like this feature you're going to try and prioritize it in our roadmap next year right so your adoption cycle usually becomes longer on B2B product and that is that that happens to be by the nature of the discipline on B2B front on B2C yeah it's unlike B2B being customer roadmap dependent dependent on B2C front it's largely user behavior dependent so if you come to realize that customers are using this feature a lot more than that feature you can really go after optimizing what you think is most appropriate for your product right for example if you've got a social media app and you come to realize that your customers are using the filters feature a lot more you can really go after it and decide hey do I want to optimize it further to really improve my engagement KPIs and so on and then lastly you would have it's mostly shorter adoption cycles like you learn something your users or customers may like it accept it or they may not like it not use it and reject it so you would have much more faster way to fail or succeed on B2C front to really decide okay how do you want to prioritize your next set of features next is really the question like are they really different right so far we talked about like how do you make product decisions how does monetization really between the two the definition of the two and really we saw stark contrast between managing products across both of these disciplines but like when it comes to like the core of the role the question is are they really different so let's really talk about what are the similarities right what what does not change regardless of the product that you are trying to manage so across both disciplines like you would have to know the customer base but regardless of you managing a B2B product or B2C you would want to know who you are really serving you would have to dive really deeper into understanding what the needs are like what are their challenges what are they trying to solve for are there process issues or are there engagement issues that really what you are trying to address across both roles you you will end up working very closely with designers on enterprise front on B2B front the nature of the work that you do with your designer could be a little different than B2C but at the very core of it you do end up working with that group of people in your company equally across both kind of products you do end up building a lot of solutions with engineers as well across both disciplines so regardless of your product being a B2B product or B2C really just partnering with your engineers plays a core role as well and lastly and more importantly really delivering monitoring and iterating on a feature does not change of course the length of the cycle and length of adoption and the rate of adoption may differ between B2B and B2C but really at the end of the day at the very core of it yeah you would be delivering features monitoring them and really iterating upon them so this is what I want to leave you with I would say this is something that I really like by Halim Donski he says your product or mine won't be confused about it won't bring happiness so what I would really say is try both if you are already in a product career and you have been doing consumer side of product a lot more feel free to jump to doing enterprise or B2B product management and really see the difference or similarities for yourself if you're doing B2B try and do the same on B2C front if you are starting off your career trying to decide like which role to go after which company to go after what kind of product is so I would say just go after what you feel most passionate about at first but then be open to really managing any kind of product and really become like agnostic to what kind of product you serve or build as a product manager with that said I would say if you do want to reach out to me you can find me on LinkedIn look up Partha Charya or if you do want to set up mentorship sessions or just one on one I do host office hours every weekend in the morning you can find me on tannily.com slash Partha Charya and I'd be happy to become part of your product management journey in any way or form possible thank you