B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
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Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#2LOL somebody's PM told them to stay on task and stop making up features out of thin air
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#3> The consequence of that is interviewing users in B2B is almost useless, and taking decisions from what users tell you is a severe error and in most cases the path to stagnation.
Who would come up with such a nonsense? Regardless of B2C or B2B, knowing what your users need solved is crucial, irrelevant who eventually the buyer is (user vs Manager)
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#4You need to be talking to Users, Customers and Stakeholders and be clear about which is which.
And if you just build what a user tells you to build, then you’re not a very good PM. Users are not designers, you go to users to get an understanding of what the problems are but users communicate problems in terms of solutions so a good PM uses the proposed solution to understand the problem and then creates a solution that actually solves that problem.
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#5It is because product managers should only be hired at the company after post product-market fit. And they innovate usually not in creating the new product, but improving the existing one, or identifying the possible new product to be created.
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#6> The consequence of that is interviewing users in B2B is almost useless, and taking decisions from what users tell you is a severe error and in most cases the path to stagnation. Who would come up with such a nonsense? Regardless of B2C or B2B, knowing what your users need solved is crucial, irrelevant who eventually the buyer is (user vs Manager)
The issue with B2B is that the decision makers are not the users of the product. You need to convince the decision makers first, as otherwise you'll not sell. Hopefully, the decision makers value user requirements as well.
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#7This is a poorly written article that is all over the place. It’s evident the author had a horrible experience with a PM. Their description of a PM is a description of a PM who’s doing their job poorly.
Qualitative research at any company is critical and poor qual research (interviewing the wrong people, asking the wrong types of questions, etc) will yield poor insights as is the case here. Any PM working at a B2B startup not understanding the complexities of how the buyer and users differ and asking questions such as, “Would you use this feature?” is a poor PM.
Don’t let one bad experience ruin your perception of the role.
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#8This post makes some wild assumptions, like the fact that B2B PMs only interview customers, and not end users. Also, that they mostly build what people are saying they want to have.
Ironically, avoiding assumptions is the basis of product management.
At the end of the day, someone has to do the product role on the team. If the founder can scale that, great, and if the engineers can do it, even better! Unfortunately both options are extremely rare to find.
There are a lot of shitty PMs out there, just as there are a lot of shitty engineers or any other job function.. We would do better, I think, to discuss and promote better patterns, than trying to discredit a whole profession by clumsily reverse engineering a handful of gross assumptions and, probably, bad personal experiences.
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#9This is a poorly written article that is all over the place. It’s evident the author had a horrible experience with a PM. Their description of a PM is a description of a PM who’s doing their job poorly. Qualitative research at any company is critical and poor qual research (interviewing the wrong people, asking the wrong types of questions, etc) will yield poor insights as is the case here. Any PM working at a B2B st…
Well I agree that this is poorly written (I wrote it).
The point of the article is not that companies shouldnt have PM, but that you shouldnt make them owner of the innovation in a B2B context. Of course if you start with the assumption of "Good PMs" it will work, but you will rarely find these "good PMs"
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#10As soon as an article states you can use “product manager” and “project manager” interchangeably, you can immediately assume the author has no idea what they’re talking about. Convenient this article did that early on, saves everyone a lot of time.