Hey there. This is The Overview, a weekly roundup of noteworthy B2B SaaS stuff. You’ll find interesting thoughts, articles, and more from around the internet.
In this post:
What B2B product managers don’t want to do
This is a great slide, and rings so true. Keeping these in mind can be helpful to build stronger PM x PMM relationships:
- Building a list of request customer features as the customer specifies
- Prioritising customer requests depending on when their contract renews
- Just copying competitors
- Being a conduit between engineering and the rest of the business
- Building ‘obvious’ stuff
The last two are most interesting. You’d think PMs would have an easier time just building the obvious stuff – and surely their whole job is about being a conduit to engineering?
PMs could build the obvious stuff – but good product managers want to think about the most relevant, value-adding problems they can be solving instead.
And whilst they do work really closely with engineering and collab both ways with the rest of the business, product managers aren’t just project managers who collect business problems and line them up for engineering to build. They have their own thoughts and opinions, and want to add value to both teams.
Great products can still fail because of bad marketing
Founders typically build a product first based on their own experiences, responding to a pain they know exists… and then look for a suitable customer for it. It can work, especially in the early stages when there’s only a small team, close internal communication and the team can adapt quickly to what they learn.
But this approach does not work for scaling, or the second product.
By the time the product is built, it’s been abstracted away from customer needs via layers of executives, product management, designers, and engineering. And there’s a distinct lack of results. Founders think “We’ve done this before, why isn’t it working?!”, while go-to-market is so broad it’s difficult to identify any areas of traction.
The only answer is resetting approach from product-first, to customer-first. Start with the customer, identify their problems and the value they desire, then build the product to deliver it.
“Better” isn’t a way to communicate value
We had the gradient trend in SaaS web design. Now we’re onto the black and purple.
But the other trend – in these examples from Mixpanel and Linear – is just to describe the value of your product as ‘better’.
What does that mean?! Blasé, pretty meaningless, and open to interpretation. It might sound cool amongst people in the know – but for the majority of people who visit (and don’t engage, don’t convert) … is it really the best impression you can give them?
Whenever you find yourself drawn to broad statements like ‘better’, keep asking why. And just say that instead.
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