I’ve made a lot of swerves and tried a bunch of things throughout my career. My first job was a software engineering role at a product development startup, and this was my first role at a B2B company. Then I switched to product management at a travel startup (think Tripadvisor) and this was as B2C as you could get. After that, I did brief stints at Zynga (gaming B2C), March Capital (a VC firm focused on B2B), Ritual (e-commerce direct to consumer B2C) and finally landed at VMware (firmly B2B). I took full advantage of my MBA to try things without making my resume look like an ADHD-addled mess.
With all my dabbling, I’ve managed to gather some insight into what product management looks like in B2B and B2C companies.
- The key differences
- User versus customer
- Qualitative data versus quantitative
- Slower versus faster product release cycles
- Well understood versus wild wild west
- What to consider when making a choice between B2B and B2C PM?
- Pros and cons
The key differences
Customer versus user
I won’t harp on this too much since I had a section about user and customer personas in my previous post, but the gist is that as a B2C PM, you’re typically building your product for one key persona - and that’s your user. That makes things simpler in a sense, but it’s not easy by any means because consumers like you and me can be fickle and hard to understand. It’s why we still don’t understand why some things go viral and some things don’t. Even at Zynga it was hard to figure out why some games were wildly successful (Angry Birds) when far “superior” games didn’t do nearly half as well.
In B2B PM, you’re building your product for two personas: the folks making the purchase decision aka your customer and the end users of the product (typically your customer’s employees). The positive is that enterprise buyers tend to be more rational. If you have a checklist of features that you offer that are good enough, you will pass muster. End users will also use your product without much complaint, assuming your UX isn’t abhorrent. However, balancing between the needs of the two personas in your product roadmap can be challenging.
Qualitative data versus quantitative
A huge chunk of revenue B2B companies bring in comes from a small subset of customers. This means when looking for product feedback, you’re often given a direct line to your largest customers. There’s also a multitude of sales and account teams that are happy to relay information back to you as PM. I personally love getting feedback that’s qualitative like this, it’s often more insightful than raw numbers. One challenge is that customers tend to be so intimately familiar with your product that instead of telling you what their underlying problems are, they will ask for solutions. Separating the two is important.
Qualitative feedback doesn’t really scale well when you have a lot of users, which is usually the case for B2C companies. It’s hard to understand trends from this type of feedback unless you have clearly demarcated user segments. But B2C products have easy-to-measure metrics and frameworks for A/B testing that are quick ways to make decisions on features. Plus, it’s hard for people to argue with data, so this can be a powerful tool to have as a consumer PM.
Slower versus faster product release cycles
At a B2B company with paying customers, you can’t ship an MVP product that barely works, and you don’t really want to move fast and break things when the consequence of that could be an entire country’s banking system going down. This means extensive testing before products get shipped, ergo longer cycles for product development. It is also harder to remove features once introduced because of support agreements that are part of the deal with customers. You also have to think 6 months to two years ahead when planning your product roadmap, which requires a lot of foresight and a clear vision of where the industry is going.
On the other hand, I can’t tell you how much I love B2C product development. Your team can push code ten times a day and change the entire user interface every year without having to face severe consequences. This is great for hypothesis driven testing and experimentation. As a PM, you are constantly kept on your toes because you never know which feature is going to take off and which feature is going to keep you up at night.
Well understood versus wild wild west
B2B product management is a known space with industry experts and playbooks for nearly every aspect of running the business. The problems being solved in the space aren’t typically revolutionary either, which means what worked once will probably work again. The B2B landscape also changes relatively slowly, so that gives most PMs and companies time to catch up.
B2C on the other hand can be insanely competitive and users have little loyalty and are suspicious of ads (thanks Facebook). The B2C PM role can be tough because merely copying the features of another similar product isn’t going to get you where you need to go. It requires constant innovation both in the product and how it is marketed.
What to consider when choosing between B2B and B2C PM?
Okay, so those were the broad differences. Now if you’re thinking about a career in product management but are unsure about whether you should pick a B2B product or a B2C product to work on, here are some pros and cons to consider for each.
Pros of B2C PM
- I’m not going to lie, B2C product management can be very sexy and a lot of fun. Having thousands of users can make you feel like you’re having a ton of impact. You can dogfood your own product pretty easily and your friends might actually know and understand what you work on. So if the name value or “brand familiarity” matters to you at all, then B2C is probably the way to go
- It is super data driven, which can be great if you’re more of a quant. On the flip side, B2C products tend to be design-centric too, so more creatively inclined PMs also have a lot to contribute
Cons of B2C PM
- I find it harder to have authority as a B2C PM because unless you founded a bunch of successful companies or have VP in your title, somehow everyone thinks they know more about product and user behavior than you do. Since B2C products tend to be easier to grok and understand, you will have inputs and suggestions coming from everywhere, whether it’s users, engineers, support teams, sales, marketing, friends, family, and random people on the street. This is why B2C PMs rely so heavily on data, it’s the only true decider
- B2C PM can also be a stressful job. Things constantly break because of rapid product development and the sheer scale of users you’re dealing with. Unhappy users are also not afraid to complain on public forums, even if your product is free to use, as most B2C products are
- B2C PM problems can feel trivial at times. There was only so much I could care about what fields to include in a user sign up form, or whether I should include a Login with Facebook option or a Login with Google option
Pros of B2B PM
- B2B PM is slower-paced and more structured, I personally think it can be a good place to start your PM career so you can learn at your own pace
- You develop so much subject matter expertise in your niche that career mobility becomes a non-issue. PMs in the enterprise space move around a ton and there’s no stigma associated with it
- I already mentioned this as a con of B2C PM but there’s no dearth of challenges in the B2B space. These products can be fairly complex, so even stepping slightly outside your own product area can mean a steep learning curve (which keeps things interesting)
- Money talks and you can put your name against large deals if you were responsible for creating the feature or product that made it happen. So you don’t have to do all the voodoo you might normally do to assign dollar values to your accomplishments like in B2C. Coming up with something like “I improved user engagement by 5% resulting in $10,000 in ad revenue” is a lot harder than you might imagine versus saying “My feature drove Coca-Cola to sign a $1M deal with us”
Cons of B2B PM
- Unfortunately, even in B2B PM, people have a lot of opinions on your product roadmap, especially if you’re new to the space. There are so many “experts” within your own company that it can be challenging to have an opinion as a PM until you get some experience and get over your imposter syndrome
- There’s typically a lot of process-oriented work you need to do as a B2B PM, including but not limited to product and API documentation, help and support requests, maintaining backward and cross-product compatibility, handholding customers etc. This can be a tedious part of the job
In general, I don’t think you can go wrong with either being a PM in either category. Most people stumble into one and stay there, some people bounce around until they find one they like better. PM skills gained in one absolutely translate to the other (although it’s easier to switch early in your career than later), so you have to make the right choice for you at the right time.