40 things I’ve learned as a SAAS Enterprise B2B Product manager
By: Anaël Ichane
Tags: Product Manager, Product Development, Product Management, B2B, SaaS

Disclaimer : It’s fully biased and contextual.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” ― Heraclitus

1. Your activities change with your company/team evolving but your mission remains the same: manage the “product decision process” and the associated “information flow”.

2. You exist because your company is constantly changing. People come and go, priorities change, new market insights arrive and thus the information flow and decision process are constantly broken. In hard words: your company needs product management but not especially product managers.

3. Bad product decisions will follow you & your team for years. For real.

4. Your unfair advantage is your average number of discussions with different people from different services. Cultivate those discussions, formalize and share the outputs.

5. You don’t have 1 team but 3: your delivery team, your business partners, your PM peers. Invest your time and energy in all of them and find the right balance.

6. You may spend a lot of time creating/testing user stories at the beginning, this may be because your “delivery” team is not autonomous enough. And you may be part of the problem. Give them more autonomy. Devs can split the work, plan it and test. UX can (must?) do feature reviews.

7. Returning from long holidays is one of the best moments to learn where you can improve as a PM. Did your team work on things that were not important? Did an important bug remain unsolved? Which decision has not been taken and why? => Those are symptoms of broken information flow or decision process.

8. We manage nobody, but we should not say we don’t have authority. If we are totally honest, in modern software companies, our job title gives us authority. The risk is to abuse it, be careful.

9. Be humble. All jobs are hard in your company. 😊

10. Your boss gets more money because their decisions are supposed to be riskier or have a bigger impact. Sometimes you need to get them to make a decision. But your job is to pave the road. Prepare scenarios and recommendations.

11. A 2 weeks sprint is not always the right time frame. It’s short if you’re building complex stuff. Don’t be too obsessed with scrum cadence.

12. Feature teams can be a trap. If your product scope is growing too fast compared to your number of people, your org will be broken. Change your org and ensure agility through outcomes-oriented teams.

13. Outcomes > Outputs but no outputs = no outcomes. So be sure your team outputs issues get solved and learn to run before flying.

14. It is statistically proven that regularly delivering things to customers increases the chance to achieve a goal than the order of the things you deliver.

15. Top 4 things to think about when your output factory is broken :

Limit work in progress

Constrain the size of your initiatives

Invest on devtooling (CI/CD)

Reduce/limit technical debt

16. Given a defined goal, do not spend too much time prioritizing between two/three “outputs” with the same expected impact (if they are small).

17. Money talks … so do not hesitate to talk with $ or €.

18. The root cause of conflicts between different services is lack of company communication at best and lack company strategy at worst. Unfortunately, as a PM you own none. Fortunately, you can do something about it.

19. Simplifying, your company strategy = Mission statement + market/segment + associated priority/investment + timeframe. Ex:

Mission statement : Ease HR Process digitization to provide employee satisfaction at scale.

Time frame : Next 12 Months

Market segment and priority :

DACH — B2B Mid-Market | High priority

US — B2B Mid-Market | Medium priority

FR — Enterprise | Low priority

20. Your product strategy must derive from your company strategy. Said in other words, you cannot build a strong product strategy without a clear company strategy.

21. OKRs are neither a company strategy nor a product strategy. It’s a tool to align people.

22. A Roadmap is not a product strategy. It’s a communication tool.

23. In very simple, Product strategy = Problems/needs your product dev org must focus on to esperate to win one or multiple market segments + associated investment/priority + time frame.

Customer struggle to manage employee data in GDRP context | High priority | Next 6 months

International companies struggle to deploy our product worldwide | Medium priority | Next 12 months

24. How do you prioritize problems? => Discovery. How do you prioritize strategic problems? => Discovery. Are you in charge of high-level product strategy (CPO/Head of/VP)? If yes, how much discovery do you do? How much structured is it? How often do you share results with your teams? In other word, you also have a decision process and an information flow to manage 😊

25. Product instinct/spider-sense is “market information”/ “known situation” your sub-conscience has processed. It comes from articles, discussions, podcasts, past events. But it’s biased. When it happens, try to retro process your product instinct to identify the information that brings you here.

26. Problems to solve are always related to customers or market needs. Attaching all problems to customers/market needs is important to give a purpose to Product Dev teams. Even for tech topics. Train/help your tech team to do so.

27. BUT sometimes attaching problems to customer / market needs can kill clarity. Ex: You want to deploy in the cloud => To decrease maintenance cost => To have more budget => To spend more money on improving the product => Because customers always want a better product. It makes sense, but is it clear? Balance is important.

28. NPS is not a problem to solve. The issue I see with “we want to improve/maintain” our NPS as a goal is that it’s hiding the problem(s) or the why of this score. Is NPS high/low on a specific segment because of UX? Because of the service itself? Be careful of not mixing the key results with the goal/problem.

29. Possibly, the company strategy is unclear or broken in pieces in different departments. (Marketing, Sales, Finance, Services and your C Level heads or recent fundraising deck). This is the bad news. The good news is you are supposed to collaborate with them closely. In that situation:

Meet each of them and ask for their department goal

Make your own hypothesis

Drop them in a document

Present it to your management

Ask them to validate/challenge.

30. Long term product vision is important. It gives sense, inspiration and energy.

31. Long term product vision is an aspirational description of what your product will provide to your customer when the problems you’ve planned to invest on have been solved.

32. The past influences the present. People carry all sorts of stories and experiences. You cannot always convince people that it is different this time (because the truth is that you don’t know).

33. Things will change often and may piss you off. Fighting change is exhaustive.

34. Things may not change enough and may piss you off too. Making things change at scale is hard and long.

35. When you want something to be different at scale, start to make it different at your scale. Lead by example and show results. Influence.

36. Sometimes, if you want a conflict to be solved, you better make it visible. Things you are compensating are not visible. You don’t have to always compensate for your org dysfunctions (Even if it’s part of our job and I know this is what you may be used to doing, a lot).

37. Do not keep your doubt for yourself. Be vulnerable and share pressure, feelings with your teams when it happens.

38. Your energy level is not unlimited. You may give a lot of energy to your organization to make things happen sometimes. Choose your battles.

39. Also know what gives you your energy back. Sanctuarize it. (Happy customers are often a great source of energy, sport, family, whatever :D)

40. Product management (product development in general) is exhaustive. Discover, Build, Measure. Nonstop. You just shipped something, you are already scoping the next one and discovering the one after. Take some time to contemplate achievements, celebrate and invite your team to do so.