🐙 Surviving B2B Product Management by Becoming an Octopus

While many B2C companies, which rely on people getting out of the house, face hard times as COVID-19 changes our routines, some B2B businesses are doing better. Livio Marcheschi, Senior Growth Product Manager at AirHelp shared his insights on building B2B Products at our Product People community event.

Livio Marcheschi, Senior Growth Product Manager at AirHelp and has learned about the benefits and the challenges of the B2B Product development first hand. Below are the major takeaways from his May 13, 2020 talk.

If you are in B2B, your client is probably a big fish and you are a small one

What makes B2B unique?

If you want to work as a Product Manager in B2B business, you need to start with understanding five key features that make B2B unique.

1. B2B has many actors with different backgrounds and visions. Even though you are providing a product to a single company, in fact, you are dealing with multiple stakeholders inside this company.
2. Your client is most probably a big fish, while you are a small one, and you need to find a way of bringing your messages across and convincing them. On the bright side, if you are doing a good job, the impact of your actions will be massive compared to B2C product development.
3. Big companies are very risk-aversive, so there will be many legal questions to figure out on the way to any new product feature. This also makes Product development much slower compared to B2C — there’ll be many dependencies and need to make agreements on multiple levels.
4. Getting user feedback will be very difficult, as your main contact will be with the people buying your service, not with those using it inside the company.
5. Your product is most probably very technical, thus you depend a lot on the development and needs a strong tech leader. This also means you need to make your client ready to face high implementation costs. On the bright side, this also makes your product more unique on the market.

A B2B product manager is an octopus

As a result, a Product Manager working in B2B needs to become somewhat of an octopus 🐙— able to manage what is happening on many levels:

• manage various wishes of multiple stakeholders of the client business
• communicate tech implications and implementation costs to the client business
• coordinate own tech team in active communication with the client tech people
• manage legal topics
• don’t get lost in all the complexity and prioritize actions properly

How to survive all this and be a good Product Manager in B2B?

Top-three tips from Livio are:

1. Do not reinvent the wheel. Build on top of the decision that was already taken, rather than try to change it, even if it’s not perfect because it was already approved on many levels.
2. Write everything down! This will save you later.
3. Try to involve your tech lead early on because the product is very complex on the technical side. Do not forget to involve tech people on the client-side early on as well.

Watch the full version of Livio’s talk. Read more insight from Livio in his Steep Learning Curves newsletter.

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Product Management People (Berlin, Germany)