Not all products are the same. As a technical product manager, you should choose a product that you are passionate about. In this post, I will describe the key differences between product managers in the Enterprise and Consumer world.

What are Enterprise and Consumer products?

Enterprise products serve the needs of an organization rather than individual users. Organizations include businesses, schools, and governments.

Commonly referred as B2B products, examples include Box, Slack, JIRA, Confluence, Office 365 for Business, Salesforce, etc

Consumer products are used by individual end-users, like you and me. In recent times, they commonly take the form of mobile applications.

Referred as B2C products, examples include Slack, Evernote, Youtube, Uber, Viki, Netflix, etc

Life as an Enterprise Product Manager

Organisations who sell products to other businesses rely heavily on their sales-force. Sales people are hired to build relationships, perform product demos, answer queries, negotiate on pricing, and most importantly, close deals.

Sophisticated, flexible, longer sales-cycle

Enterprise products are traditionally more sophisticated but flexible. Customers can customise what the eventual product would comprise of. Therefore, written contracts are the norm to sell such products.

Solution architects and professional services are often found in enterprise product companies. They help the sales team to design solutions using core products. These solutions are then delivered as part of a project, typically ranging from 3-12 months (depending on scope and complexity).

Thus, in order to sustain the development and sales of enterprise products, they are priced higher than their consumer counter-parts. Prices typically range from 50k to millions.

Slower feedback loop and pace

In the enterprise world, product managers typically rely on sales feedback to improve their products. Users tend not to publicise any annoyances, but rather would let their companies (who made the decision to buy the product) know. Most modern enterprise products, however, will incorporate feedback channels directly into the product.

In a well-established, mature enterprise product company, like Microsoft, working pace as an enterprise product manager tend to favour work-life-balance. There are no events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, where products need to be released.

Do-it-yourself enterprise products

In recent times, enterprise companies have focused on selling their products directly online, without the need for direct sale-force.

Companies like Slack and DropBox offer companies free-and-easy self-service subscription of their services. For examples, DropBox created Box to allow companies to store their files securely on the cloud.

When i worked at Bosch Software Innovations, we decided to sell our IoT product suite on the Amazon Marketplace. Subscribers are instantly on-boarded and can use our service literally within hours, rather than waiting for weeks or months.

Life as a Consumer Product Manager

Organisations who sell products directly to end-users like you and me, tend to rely on viral marketing, word-of-mouth than using a sales-force.

High publicity, fast pace

In recent times, the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter testified before Congress about how their companies operated. Johnson & Johnson faced numerous lawsuits about their powder products. Be prepared to face higher scrutiny when designing a consumer product.

Release cycles are also aggressive. Lazada, a leading e-commerce marketplace in South-east Asia, run numerous campaigns over the year. Being scrappy and getting things done are skills very much required.

Huge customer base, lots of data

As there are numerically more people than companies in the world, consumer products have a much larger customer base. This is advantageous as there are more data points to track habits, behaviours, patterns and feedback. Consumer product managers with data analytics skills can perform their own analysis, using enterprise tools to draw conclusions and improve their products.

Of course with a larger customer base, comes a bigger customer service team, comprising of hot-line and possibly service centre personnel.

Performance is critical

Most enterprise software products use internally within the company, in HR, Finance, Sales or Engineering, focus on features and not execution performance. They tend to be slower than consumer products, where patience is mostly thinner. Why? Simply because there are more choices for consumers for the same product. For software products, consumers can easily uninstall the application and pick another one. Good luck with trying to convince the purchasing department to switch your HR system!

Which do you prefer?

Although enterprise and consumer products are different in nature, they too have many similarities. As a technical product manager for both consumer products (Wego.com) and enterprise products (Bosch, GE), I can say they are both exciting, challenging and requires your utmost dedication.

Ultimately, you are creating products that users should love. That is my primary goal. What is yours?