Thread by @saranormous

#TuesdayThread on B2B Product👇🏽

1/ talking to a friend this morning who went from consumer product gal > enterprise founder about why "consumer-grade product" is a concept

2/ as an enterprise product person, this kind of offends me. but! there is a grain (maybe an entire bag) of truth in this criticism. I've given entire presentations about why is enterprise product overall not as strong on usability (and why that's a huge opportunity)

3/ one reason that must be recognized -- many workflows in the enterprise are simply more complex. the physics of the job-to-be-done. you can't get around this

4/ but most enterprise "product jobs" could be much better done! no one ever sets out to build a complicated and clunky user experience -- but many get there with 1000 cuts: a long series of decisions prioritizing "enterprise" and fringe power user use cases vs. new/core users

5/ the products for bottoms-up/freemium companies are often able to better sustain the discipline of user-friendly design, because they have the end-user buyer/smb base that balances out the demands of the "enterprise"

6/ if you're building a b2b product today -- ask yourself -- how much of my resource is devoted to building more complexity/features, vs. continually reducing complexity/increasing feature adoption? A common mistake I see in companies is being hugely overweight to the former

7/ a significant part of b2b product management in 2020 is figuring out how to toe the line between enterprise "need to haves" and end-user or SMB/MM "love to haves"

8/ I'm personally inspired when companies can build something users love and can adopt - so much that they will champion to the enterprise "buyer" (smart companies then follow up on/amplify that user love with the sales assist)

9/ let's build more "business-grade products" with incredibly intuitive and simple user experience. it's ambitious, for these complex jobs-to-be-done, but it's also a worthy cause. we (hopefully) spent more time working than we do on Netflix and Instagram