Being a B2B PM vs. a B2C PM
When I first thought about becoming a Product Manager, I didn't spend too much time thinking about the differences between working on a B2B product vs. a consumer product, I was just trying to get my foot in the door and was open to any product I found interesting. A few years later, I've realized that both roles come with their own set of challenges and opportunities. If you’re considering you're next career move as a PM, are graduating college and considering a product role, or are just curious to learn more about my personal experiences with both, you might find this post helpful. Disclaimer: these are based on my own experiences, thoughts, and opinions.
B2B (Business to Business)
As a B2B PM, your end-user and key decision-maker (the one who signs off on the purchase of your product), are often two different people. Understanding how to best support these two stakeholders as well as your cross-functional team members (engineering, solutions engineering/support, sales, and more), through the products and features you release will be day-to-day tasks as a B2B PM.
Day-to-day
Pre and post-sales calls with customers
You may be asked to answer questions about your product during a pre-sales or post-sales call. Typically sales team members or solution engineers may be able to answer most customer questions, but you may be brought in on a call to provide deeper insight and discuss the product roadmap.
Troubleshooting key product issues with solution engineers and uncovering product gaps
You may review tickets that come through from customers or suggestions from the sales team based on conversations with customers. These will help you understand what is and isn’t working for customers.
XFN meetings to collaborate on the product roadmap and any upcoming releases
In collaboration with your engineering team, you will likely be attending sprint ceremonies like standups, Sprint Planning, Grooming, and Retrospectives.
You’ll also be setting the vision for your product, collaborating with your engineering team on quarterly planning, and working with other Product Managers on setting up the best product processes for your teams.
Highlights
It’s easy to stay close to customers
You’ll be able to hop on calls with customers, hear how they’re using your product, and the problems they’re having. This is a bit harder to do in the B2C world.
Solution engineers, product ops on the front lines
You’ll (usually) have a support team on the front lines to help customers troubleshoot common issues, configure settings, and run customer workflows. This helps you focus on developing the future state of your product.
Stickiness and stability
B2B products tend to be stickier and chances are, once your customer signs up to use your product, they will be sticking around for a while. This offers PMs more time to understand an established set of customers and their distinct journeys.
Challenges
Sales cycles
Depending on your product, you might be dealing with a lengthy sales cycle with many back and forth calls. The end of a quarter can turn into a juggling act with meetings for features your engineering team is trying to ship and custom product requests from customers the sales team is trying to strike a deal with.
Customization
Businesses can have so many diverse needs and a lot of SaaS companies offer custom solutions to support these needs. For a PM however, this can mean surprise requests for custom features from an important client. These features may or may not align with others on your roadmap and it can be a bit disorienting to engineers and other technical stakeholders.
Struggling to relate or connect with your users
There are many SaaS PMs who’ve never come across the need to use their own products. Although this isn’t a requirement to be a good B2B Product Manager, it does help provide a personal connection to the product you are building, if you’ve had the experience of using it.
Demoing your product to a potential customer!
B2C (Business to Consumer)
As a B2C PM, you’ll be focused on delivering the best experience for your end-user in the hope that they will start to (or continue to) use, subscribe, or pay for your product. Like a B2B PM, you’ll be working with a set of stakeholders that will support you along this journey. Depending on the product you’re working on, you may be working with teams like operations, data science, or partnerships closely.
Day-to-Day
Meetings with internal stakeholders.
You’ll likely be meeting with internal stakeholders from various teams like marketing, analytics, design, support, partnerships, and operations. These teams will help you execute the vision you have for your product and understand various problems you can help solve for the end-user.
Understand user behavior through analytics, UX testing, and more
Because it’s a bit tough to hop on a call with the users who use your product every day as a Consumer PM, you have to learn to use analytics, UX research, and other data to inform product decisions. A lot of your day might be spent on the discovery of customer problems through various data points you can collect. B2B PMs do this as well, but it’s usually easier for them to join a sales call or get 1:1 interaction with customers.
XFN meetings to collaborate on the product roadmap and any upcoming releases
Similar to a B2B PM, you’ll be spending time with your engineering team on planning and checking in on the progress of product development.
Highlights
Design/UX
Many PMs enjoy collaborating with designers on figuring out what their product should look like and how users will interact with it. If you find this to be an area that you enjoy spending time on, then you can also find this in a B2B PM role (if your product area has a frontend component).
Testing competitors
Usually, it’s pretty easy to understand your competitors when you’re building B2C products. You can sign up for these consumer services and test out their features. In the B2B world, you may have to rely on UX researchers, customers, and other data to understand your space better since many B2B products aren’t created for individual usage.
Establishing a Personal connection to your product
You might find it easier to relate to your users because you might actually be a user of the product you work on! It can be interesting to use your own product and hear about your product from friends and family.
Challenges
Fickle user behavior
User behavior can often be fickle and difficult to understand, and when you have to do this on a large scale (millions of users for example), it can start to get difficult to understand what keeps users returning to your product and what might be prompting them to steer away.
Building for a wide range of users
This can be a really interesting aspect of being a B2C PM and can be challenging as well. Depending on your product, a very wide range of users may be using your product with different goals. You may also have different products for different users (seller-side applications and buyer-side applications for example) to keep in mind.
You can easily test out your competition as a B2C PM. Sometimes from the comfort of your own couch!
I’ve likely missed a bunch of day-to-day tasks, highlights, and challenges, but I hope this was a helpful overview! Here are some more articles that may be useful to read if you’re interested in learning more: