I've spent most of my career as a B2C (Business-to-Consumer) PM -- first at eBay, a couple of startups, and then LinkedIn. So when I joined HubSpot, a B2B (Business-to-Business) company, in 2016, it felt like I had to learn how to PM all over again.
Product Managers everywhere are the voice of the customer, but in B2C, I *was* a customer, and in B2B, I needed to learn Inbound Marketing before I developed my voice. Making things more difficult, HubSpot only had around 10k paying customers when I joined so quantitative data was scarce. I learned how to interview customers better and choose the right customers to get a wide swath of feedback.
In 2016, B2B and B2C environments were fundamentally different
The challenges the B2C PMs faced were pretty simple to explain -- things like How do we increase the number of people who scroll through the LinkedIn Feed? or How can we show the car part that we know will fit a customers vehicle when they search eBay Motors? The solutions to these problems involved complex engineering to predict which posts would be most interesting to users and massive amounts of data to do asynchronous analysis to map car part "fitment." The problems were easy the solutions were hard.
The challenges B2B PMs faced were opposite. One example of a problem at HubSpot was around our NPS. Despite frequently releasing features that were loved by their users, the overall NPS for the Marketing product was frustratingly not changing over the course of several years. It was not until we suffered a big engineering failure in 2019 and had to focus on stability that we started, to many people's surprise, see dividends in our NPS measurements. We had interviewed thousands of employees and decision makers in our customer base and very very few had complained about stability and uptime. B2B problems are difficult but when they're identified, the solutions are actually pretty easy.
The differences in the practice of product management also explained the composition of the people who were hired to be PMs. At LinkedIn and eBay, PMs had previously been Engineers or Data Analysts. Whereas at HubSpot, PMs are largely "homegrown" from the support or services organization.
In Comes Product Led Growth
Enterprise software used to be sold by sales people with promises of functionality that the software could deliver. Selling to CIOs who never used the products themselves led to poorly designed products that inspired hatred among people who have to use them. To pick an easy target... how long does it take you to fill out expense reports with Concur? They've got the majority of the market and yet the majority of their users find the software extremely frustrating.
Enterprise software today is changing. Companies like Slack, Invision, Intercom, Drift, and HubSpot are bypassing the traditional Sales (person) channel and allowing customers, frequently their end users, to trial and purchase software directly. This matches the way customers buy consumer goods, and the way they want to buy their business software. The phone is dead. (If you're not convinced, this is a good article why Product Led Growth is also good for business)
Product led growth flips some of the very basic assumptions of being a B2B PM... the job requirements start looking a lot like B2C PM.
The biggest shift from a sales to a PLG model is the addition of a free trial or free tier of the product that creates mounds of data. "Free" is gasoline to usage. All of a sudden, inbound customer interest can immediately play with the product. And when usage increases, so does data. How many of those users convert? What do they click on ("PQL-points") to convert? Which features do they use?
In legacy B2B companies teams, the sales team had the most data because they had to position the product in every conversation they had. Sales knew, in their bones, what made the product sell.
In Product Led Growth companies, data democratizes the organization. The usage data from Free adoption helps PMs identify what features are likely going to drive further demand. The specific PQL points in the product help Marketers tune their messages and allows Sales to close larger enterprise deals when they already know which features the customer is interested in. PLG aligns the organization like nothing before it.
How do B2B PMs thrive in a PLG atmosphere?
PMs are, and will always be, the voice of the customer. The difference in this new world is that we can now understand the myriad of the voices that we hear in a scalable way. We are no longer limited by n=1 conversations for a feature request that, possibly, no one else but this one customer wants.
With the power of data, PMs can now find improvements that move the needle without spending months of even years in 1 on 1 customer conversations.
With the power of PLG, PMs can now make product changes that can be directly tied to business outcomes without tagging along on Sales meetings to close "that big one."
And most importantly, with the power to control the user experience, PMs can make B2B software better and more enjoyable to use... for the benefit of the customer and the company.