Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reflecting on a career in product management

newsletter.bringthedonuts.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–27 of 27 posts

Re: Reflecting on a career in product management

#21

Post by polote »

realityking wrote: post #17
somewhereoutth wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. BTC/SMB is about creating a complete product to serve many customers in the marketplace and take advantage of economies of scale. Marketing is key. B2E is about working with perhaps just a few clients to develop bespoke solutions (that may have a product element) targeting their specific business needs. Relationship building is key.

Where do you see solutions like Twillio and Cloudflare in this? They have a complete solution taking advantage of scale but make most of their money in Enterprise deals?

Cloudflare and Twillio are special, they are dev tools. Classical business rules dont apply to them

Re: Reflecting on a career in product management

#22

Post by thenerdhead »

dexterous wrote: post #20
thenerdhead wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. It's a very logical, data-driven mindset that is only concerned about "pushing the needle closer" rather than providing actual value. Many of the mechanisms of how those teams operate are flawed. You may have filed the same issue that was closed previously because of low upvotes, but now there are multiple reports of it! It's almost an anti-pattern of being data-driven. Most companies know that business metrics…

The COO at my last job kept touting the aphorism "Data Trumps Opinion" to the point where he had T-shirts made with that (facepalm!) I'm just glad those just sat on his table and never made it onto anyone's back.

Uck. I get that people can feel that way as opinions are often way worse, but tshirts? Haha

Re: Reflecting on a career in product management

#23

Post by dexterous »

realityking wrote: post #17
somewhereoutth wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. BTC/SMB is about creating a complete product to serve many customers in the marketplace and take advantage of economies of scale. Marketing is key. B2E is about working with perhaps just a few clients to develop bespoke solutions (that may have a product element) targeting their specific business needs. Relationship building is key.

Where do you see solutions like Twillio and Cloudflare in this? They have a complete solution taking advantage of scale but make most of their money in Enterprise deals?

B2C markets with long-tails.

Re: Reflecting on a career in product management

#24

Post by doctor_eval »

Spooky23 wrote: post #16
doctor_eval wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t necessarily disagree with you re B2B vs B2C but I think we should question it. There is nothing fundamentally different between apps for these audiences. So why do they require different mindsets?

You need to convince a user to adopt in B2C. There needs to be a benefit to them and you need to understand them. I run a large line of business in a big “E”. Our requirements may not even be known to the end users and may make their lives miserable. Nobody cares. We have lots of money, but I can’t tell the taxing authority that we can’t comply with some demand in 3 months because our finance clerks will be miserable…

I understand this. And in your case maybe it makes sense. But does the enterprise ever consider the cost of making the finance clerks miserable? These costs can be in terms of staff retention, acquisition, and especially efficiency.

Honest question. I’ve done consulting in big-E (telco) and internal user ergonomics are more often than not thrown under the bus in the name of pet product feature from some noisy but inexperienced stakeholder that are not needed in practice. This doesn’t apply to your example, but in my case compliance was already considered, and didn’t change often. Yet still, they seemed to hate the internal users.

I always felt that there was an economic case to be made for making users lives less miserable, and I’ve come to the conclusion that in most cases enterprise software is bad due to cultural and political reasons (lack of ability to say no to stupid features, lack of discipline around feature implementation, lack of domain knowledge, artificial time pressure, etc) rather than economic reasons.

Re: Reflecting on a career in product management

#25

Post by doctor_eval »

polote wrote: post #7
doctor_eval wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t necessarily disagree with you re B2B vs B2C but I think we should question it. There is nothing fundamentally different between apps for these audiences. So why do they require different mindsets?

I didnt say B2C vs B2B. I said B2C or B2B SMB vs B2B Enterprise In B2C or B2B SMB the goal of the company is to deliver the best product for doing some use case In B2B Enterprise the goal of the company is to deliver a vision to customers, the product doesn't come first and should be more 'complete' than 'good'

Sorry, I understood what you meant but overly abbreviated my response.

I understand your point about “complete” versus “good” but I have always wondered about the economic impact of the decision to deliver low quality user interfaces (“more complete than good”) to front line operators.

I’ve worked in a number of enterprise domains and I’ve found that the more I empathise with the uses of my software (ie, the front-of-house workers, not the end customer) the more I see benefits to the organisation in terms of staff motivation and efficiency, which translates to a better end-customer experience as well.

I’m just not convinced that something can really be said to be “complete” if it is not also “good”.

Re: Reflecting on a career in product management

#26

Post by doctor_eval »

kbos87 wrote: post #15
danjac wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

B2C - you have to design an app that appeals to people who will buy and use it. B2B - you have to design an app that appeals to people who will buy it and force other people to use it.

This is still true in pockets but in some spaces it’s falling out of favor. Companies and leaders know that they need to worry about adoption, so there’s slow but increasing focus on end user UX and incorporating these folks into the buying process.

Yes, this has been my experience too. The buyers of enterprise software today have been raised on B2C software and are starting to expect the same level of usability, comprehensibility and friendliness.

It is not a case of form over function, so much as it is that form and function are interdependent.

I’ve worked as a senior manager for a couple of enterprise app developers, and if I was to do it again, a great UI would be a prerequisite.

On the other hand, many large enterprises are still beholden to consulting companies which tend to be checklist driven.

Re: Reflecting on a career in product management

#27

Post by ta988 »

luckydata wrote: post #18
daniealapt wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can learn the art. You can learn and reflect. For learning, read. “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie, or “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek come to mind. They will grow your communication, vision setting and influencing skills. Skills which are part of the “art” of product management. And every day provides an opportunity to reflect and learn from the day’s events.

Sinek is a fraud. There's nothing useful to be learned from that book that you can't get from common sense.

You would be surprised as to how sparsely distributed what one thinks as "common sense" can be.
Post reply on HN