 Hi everyone. My name is Chris Callagher and I'm here to talk to you today about roadmap management in a B2B context. Specifically, I want to talk about how to handle and balance specific and very boutique customer requests coming in from your large and premium customers and balancing that with your set-out product management and the product vision that you had that you think will impact the largest number of users and largest number of customers. I think it's a pretty common problem in the B2B environment, so we can discuss this a little bit. Before I start, I'll give you a brief introduction to myself. Like I said, my name is Chris. I am currently a product manager at Zoom and I will caveat this that the opinions I express here are mine and mine alone. They do not reflect the opinions of my current or previous employers. Additionally, my LinkedIn profile is at the bottom. If you feel free to reach out and connect and continue this conversation further. I want to start with a brief overview. It should be pretty straightforward. First, I want to go into what the problem of discussing is, trying to lay out an example of that. You have an understanding of what this problem is, hopefully it resonates with you. Next, I want to discuss an approach and some tactics that I've used in order to help with this problem. You can see them there, but definitely this is, I think, I want to discuss some very specific tactics, maybe a little bit more of a tactical discussion in a B2B environment. A lot of things we'll discuss will assume that a lot of the other product manager work has been done. For example, building a roadmap, doing the customer discovery, things of that nature. This is definitely a very focused discussion, but hopefully a useful one. Hopefully this can bring some tactics to your tool belt in order to help you influence your customers and your organization. To provide, at the end of the day, a better product to all of your stakeholders. First, I want to get a little into the problem statement. This is something that I've experienced very often as a B2B product manager and talking to my peers. They have also experienced. To give you the narrative of the problem, typically as a product manager, you spend a lot of time developing and building your roadmap through talking to customers, talking to end users to see where their pain points are, going through a bunch of cycles with data science to understand how people are using their products, what opportunities are, looking at market research, and going through this process to refine and groom a well-defined roadmap. Again, I'm not going to go into detail on the mechanisms to do that. However, I'm going to go through and assume that you've done a great job of building your roadmap and you're very confident that this roadmap is going to deliver the maximum value to your customer base. Oftentimes, after you've done this or in the process of doing this, you get a very large customer, and particularly in the B2B context, you'll have a large customer who comes in, who's very important, has a lot of weight within the organization, and they'll come in with a very boutique request. That isn't small or trivial, but actually takes a lot of resources. Maybe you try and push back on this, but at the end of the day, you have to end up doing this very specific request that really only impacts that one customer. Then that takes a lot of resources away from your roadmap. Once you have this reduction in resources, you try and reconfigure roadmap and still provide the maximum value with the resources you have left and the capacity you have left. Just once you do that, just in time for another escalation to happen from a different customer with another very specific request. This cycle tends to come through, and if it's not managed well, it can really destroy what your roadmap was, and at the end of the day, you look back and say, hey, I didn't accomplish any of the goals that I planned to at the beginning of the quarter or the beginning of the year, and you spend most of your resources doing a very one-off thing for these large customers, which is great because you're addressing these needs of these large customers, but those engineering resources and design resources are not going towards problems that are very scalable and address your entire user base. One, I think it's important to discuss why this happens because I think it is something that does happen fairly often, especially in the B2B context, and I think it's important not to just struggle away as something that you shouldn't be concerned about or something that's just sort of an artifact of your organization, but there is a reason why this problem occurs. I think you really need to understand that to be able to manage it. What I have there in the first bullet I think is really important is that the best product doesn't always win and that distribution really matters. In the context of a B2B environment, a lot of times distribution is a sales person and going and pitching this to, and really a sales team and account team building a relationship with a customer and selling them on the solution and selling them not only on the product, but on the organization. Really, a lot of what they're selling is that relationship and really to distribute your product, you need to have people who have direct relations with these customers. Because when a customer is going to spend billions of dollars, they really want to make sure that they're going to be taken care of. They're spending a lot of money with a vendor and they want to make sure that they feel comfortable that they're going to be taken care of and treated like someone who is spending that amount of money. Additionally, when it comes to these requests, if you're in a B2C environment, we're dealing with a consumer product like a Facebook or an Amazon and Amazon e-commerce. If you lose one user, there's one user who or one customer that doesn't like your product and you don't have a future that meets the need of that one person, then they leave, but it's really not a big impact on your overall business. But in the B2B context, if you have one customer leave that really has an outside impact which they could bring with them, it's one customer but it's millions of users or maybe thousands of users, millions of dollars. This really comes down to being able to get your product in the hands of these enterprise users. You do make sure that you're maintaining that relationship and taking care of your lines, taking care of your lines of distribution in addition to building the best product. I think the second bullet here is really important is that I think oftentimes this is neglected as not part of my job as a product manager and you think it should be more on the account team but I definitely want to highlight that influence is a key PM skill and this is part of the job. I think people, if you don't treat it as part of the job then it will really come back to bite you but if you really look at it as, hey, this is investment in my job, maintaining those relationships with both internal and external stakeholders including our customers is really how I can influence the people, my stakeholders in order to steer the organization including the customers in a direction that I think is best for the overall ecosystem. Hopefully that gives you some context of while this is a very tactical discussion I think it's really a key skill especially in the B2B environment and a subset of that influencing skill that is often talked about but I think often we don't are given very concrete tool on how to approach this so hopefully this gives you a concrete tool to solve a concrete problem in a B2B environment. So after discussing the problem I don't want to reiterate it here again and some assumptions I have when discussing this solution I'm assuming that the feature that comes in that is being requested by this large customer is very specific and unique to them. If this is something that is not very specific and pretty broad and this customer is really feeling this pain point enough to escalate it to you then maybe you need to really look at your roadmap that is definitely something you need to validate that, hey, I don't think this is important but this customer is really making a fuss about this so is that assumption actually correct you need to go back validate see if this is actually just a one-off request or is this something that's going to be out broadly by the rest of your customers and maybe you need to refactor your roadmap based on that always being in tune to updating customer demands and market changing you may need to update your roadmap and additionally I think this is assuming that you have that roadmap to make center that last thought this is assuming that you have a good roadmap in place and that the things that you're working on are not going to are maximizing the benefit of your users and your customers and you've gone through that due diligence you've gone through the due diligence of processing this request and understanding that it is truly a very small subset and not worth the resources at this time so making those assumptions here's something that I found that sort of some tactics that I found to work with the customer and the account team to make sure that you say that you handle this request appropriately first thing is ensuring that they know their voice matters I think and I'll go into each of these in detail so I won't linger on them here the second one is showcasing your vision presenting that compelling roadmap that you had and really getting them bought in on it and the last one is understanding the context of your customers and the context that your company is in because this is often dependent on the actions you decide to take is really what is the relationship with your customer and where is your company at so diving into a little bit more into the first bullet ensuring that the customer knows their voice matters so again I think this is something that I think definitely falls into the realm of the product manager's job and being an influencer within your organization as a product manager I think sometimes people tend to want to delegate to customer teams and you can definitely like you need to find a way where you can do this at scale but I definitely think it is part of your job to talk to the customer and be part of that relationship that they feel they have with your company so part of that is providing them the experience that you would expect if you spent a lot of money because you're the person who holds the keys to the roadmap they really want to talk to you and even by talking to them they understand at least they are getting their voice heard by the people who can make the decision of what to do next and so I know even if you don't say yes to them at the end of the day the customer wants the opportunity to explain and have their moment to voice their concerns or their ideas with you and even if you're just sitting down and writing that time and providing that time and discussing that product vision I think is really a key step in making sure that they feel that they're a valued member, a valued stakeholder in your decision making and that will help in turn build that relationship Additionally I think it's important to talk through their issues, often times there are many layers of communications and details get dropped that's the classic case of the telephone game and you really want to understand what their issue is there's often times that they may not be familiar with other parts of the product or another feature that might help solve their problem but you really want to talk to them about what find out what their problem is and brainstorm with them and you want to figure out if this is a unique request and why are other customers not having this issue and ways that they're solving this problem and then I think it's also important to understand the customer's internal stakeholders because a lot of times when these escalations come to you as the product manager it's definitely an interesting dynamic in the B2B environment often times it can be just one individual within a large company that can be causing or occur and that might not be something that's commonly held within your customers but there's this one individual that happens to be at a large company so that gives their voice and outsize impact compared to the rest of the users and so really understanding and often times that might not even be the direct point of contact that your account team or that works with your customer so for example if you are interacting with the IT administrator within an organization then maybe it's not even the IT administrator's concern but maybe it's their legal team's concern and maybe the next step is to have the customer's legal team and your internal legal team have a conversation about how a particular legal risk is handled and how they view this legal risk and you might not even need to make changes to the product so I think that's part of this process is brainstorming with them, understanding where the real problem is and brainstorming of non-product ways that you can solve this problem because I think if this is a problem that only one customer has it's typically unusual so maybe there are ways that you can handle this without building it into the product which is the heavy handiest way the most heavy handed way that you could address this issue so the next is to showcase your vision and I think this is really one of the most important steps is putting your roadmap to work if you do have a well constructed roadmap you should have talked to a lot of customers and really understand what their biggest pain portents are so if you can say hey we understand your concern now because I'm working on all these other great things hopefully that ignites excitement and gives you another champion for your roadmap hopefully if your roadmap is constructed well hopefully the customer really understands the pain points that you're addressing and gets really excited about having those problems solved and those opportunities chased where they really see your vision and your request might be taking away from resources from that and even they are hopefully bought in and a stakeholder in developing the roadmap that you think is most impactful and I think another important thing here when you talk about developing that relationship with the customer especially with that buying persona it's really important in a B2B SaaS environment because when these large enterprise customers buy SaaS products it's typically not a very the switching costs are relatively low compared to historical on-prem solutions but they're definitely non-trivial switching costs so when they're picking a vendor large enterprise customers often picking a vendor for many years they have a pretty large deployment cycle it's not easy to get users to switch from one business tool to another business tool so they really and they're migrating data often as part of this so it really is an investment on their part so not only do they want to understand and feel like they're investing in the best product today but they want to make sure that you're having continued investment that your product continues to be the best so part of how you communicate that is through your roadmap invested in a partner that is continuing to build the product and continue to give a best in class experience so I think all this to say that often when you get these escalations if you just flat out say no I'm not going to do that it really lands wrong with the customer because it feels like to the customer that you're just not you're not doing that and they don't really necessarily know what you're working on they might think you have a good roadmap but unless that's explicitly communicated to them they don't know why you can't work on their request when they're a large enterprise customer they have a very they think they have an important say in your organization and if you should get a flat out no it just feels like nothing is happening in some way so being able to have that facetime and share with them and the vision gives it gives them the opportunity to see what those resources are going to and give them hopefully some excitement about what is to come and the third and final one point here is that really understanding that context is important and I think this is sort of along the lines of you have to be as a product manager you have to be a little bit scrappy and it's not always the textbook way to do product management is not what happens in practice there's a lot of business implications and relationship implications within these large B2B contexts that really have to be accounted for and also this is like to give you permission to say like yeah it's okay in order to prioritize a feature to maintain a relationship with a very important company that is a big logo for your organization so I think there's some things that might not show up in a typical product management lecture or product management quote unquote book but it's really important to be scrappy and to understand that doing this for a customer for example if you are a growing company and you really want to get a big name logo to establish yourself and establish credibility it may be that this features just for one very specific customer but gaining that big name logo will gain credibility and the impact from that credibility gain will be much more than any feature that you could launch with the same amount of resources so having that understanding and where that relationship is with the customer if they're maybe a new customer who's on a legacy provider or incumbent that is one of your main competitors then maybe it makes sense they might need a little bit more to switch them over or if you're a small company and trying to get these large logos that give you credibility then it makes a lot more sense in order to do these one-off requests so all that I mean I think something that's very helpful here is often data so if you have a couple different options you can understand and try and make some predictions about how much incremental revenue a new feature will get you vice this new large customer and you can do a little bit more direct comparison so definitely in this case data is your friend if you have a large feature that you think is impactful having some data of the impact that you project that to be whether it's percentage of usage increase or a market that is unlocked and you can do a little more direct comparison about compared to what you think doing this specific request for a customer would be alright so that ends my presentation here I appreciate you spending this time with me today and feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions, thanks