1) Another product strategy topic I am focused on: the difference between building consumer & enterprise/B2B SW. I hope there will be lots of comments/chatter around this thread as my career has focused on consumer. I look to others to fill in my blindspot on enterprise/B2B.
2) Here's a high-level summary of my thinking. I am curious how others see the key differences between consumer and enterprise and what consumer product leaders can learn from enterprise product leaders & vice-versa. 
3) I have limited experience in B2B, but half the folks I work with at product strategy workshops are B2B folks and I believe I am as helpful to them as I am to consumer peeps, so there's hope. I'd like to be more thoughtful, however, about the differences between the two.
4) The key challenge in building consumer products: you are trying to catch "lightning in a bottle." It takes lots of discipline/luck to anticipate what will resonate with consumers. Case: Twitter started as a product that let the world know what you're doing at a moment in time.
5) With B2B you can build an early product that has strong demonstrated interest to a subset of customers-- they agree to pay for It. But will it scale? Is there a big market for it that you can efficiently reach via a combination of sales and marketing efforts?
6) And that's where things feel very different. Before the internet, I built software that went into shrink-wrapped packages. I relied on sales/marketing to get the software onto the shelves. In 1998, with my first consumer internet startup, the site became the package.
7) At Netflix, the marketing team defined the product positioning/brand, and the product team brought these ideas to life. A strong partnership was required between product and brand, and there was no sales function.
8) Both consumer and enterprise require lots of exploration to invent the future. In consumer you can "duct tape and glue" an early MVP, but in enterprise, it's harder to "fake" a product. You look to find a reference customer with a real product that they will pay for. Hum.
9) In consumer, your user is the customer. In enterprise, your consumers are often NOT the buyer. There's a different person that evaluates the value of the product, and a protracted sales process to get this person to buy.
10) In consumer, you learn to embrace simplicity. You can predict many AB test "winners" by asking yourself, "which is simpler?" But in enterprise, complexity is required. There are folks who spend 5-10 hours/day using your software-- they ask for and require complex features.
11) In consumer, it's often "one product for all." Netflix has evolved for 20 years but it's still about making it easy for members to find and watch movies/tv shows. Enterprise sw companies tend to develop suites of software with discrete sets of customers. That feels harder.
12) In both, product strategy ensures focus and alignment. But in enterprise, given the relative importance of key large customers, you need to build alignment outside the company, helping large clients to understand what you are working on and why. Again, that feels hard.
13) And in consumer, where "consumer science" requires a deft mix of art and science, there's an opportunity for liberal arts majors like me to thrive. I think enterprise sw requires more technically adept product leaders than consumer. True?
14) In both, my model of defining product strategies as theories and hypotheses to "delight customers in hard to copy, margin-enhancing ways" works. In both areas, the hard to copy advantages revolve around economies of scale, network effects, brand, and unique technologies.
15) But a hard to copy advantage like "switching costs" feels much bigger in enterprise than consumer. Switching from Oracle to Salesforce. Hard. Switching from Hulu to Amazon Prime. Easy.
16) The tools, models & frameworks that define product strategy help consumer & enterprise organizations to scale by building alignment. Product strategy enables product leaders to craft a vision & define what's important (& what's not) as they work to invent the future.
So, I leave you again with my little visual summary of the differences between consumer and enterprise and ask for any specific examples/stories that might help consumer product leaders to learn from enterprise peeps, and vice versa. Thanks in advance, Gib (fine to DM, too).
