AMA: Gainsight Group Product Manager, Pavan Kumar on Enterprise Product Management

Know your customer - Often this can just be the investor in the company/company owner. Meet their basic expectations from the product first, and win their confidence. Aim to build a functional prototype / MVP even before attempting to build a fully functional product - It is always important to be able to showcase your product and always be demo ready - Else we run the risk of being dismissed as vapourware It's easy to get carried away by all the great ideas, Identify your core product USPs earl ...Read More

One of the core functions of an enterprise PM (on top of being a specialist and a subject matter expert) is their knack for 'abstracting' and 'generalising' requirements.  As such few (not an exhaustive list) pointers from a candidate's past experience where they have demonstrated some of these traits in their past work would help them stand out: Identifying macro patterns that can be generalised, and productised. E.g. building a flexible user permission schema vs building standardized user role ...Read More

This has always been a chicken and egg problem, and the challenge itself is compounded by the fact that larger customers demand more scrutiny, (longer sales cycle).  Depending on the maturity level of your product - If you are in an early build phase, it is probably worth going down a trial/beta period with a functional PoC built to demonstrate the product. - However, as the product matures and you onboard more customers, it becomes extremely challenging to entertain such requests, where having ...Read More

Some key traits that would really help in a fresh PM interview situation: Passion for product, its inner workings, ability to interpret some of the best features and bad ones - Typically I ask the candidate to choose any popular tech product of their choice (say Netflix and compare it to Hotstar/ amazon prime). This simple exercise can reveal the candidate's thought process as they walk me through it. Strong communication skills are a big bonus, but the ability to articulate and convey an idea i ...Read More

I usually ask myself a few questions when we are being asked to commit resources to 'tasks outside of the strategic product roadmap'. The primary aim is to not deviate from the core road map unless the short-term benefit (retaining the customer) is justified.  Is this feature request bespoke only and doesn't require any product-level change? - If yes, offload it to the 'professional services team' and bill the customer directly for the work done. Usually larger enterprises prefer getting the one ...Read More

No one answer suits all situations!  Often the impact of a feature is not based on the size/complexity of the feature, but rather the 'value' it can deliver for our customers and most importantly - if it sets us up for launching more impactful features in the long term where it can become an enabler. As an example, when I was looking at reducing the cost of text messaging for our CPaaS platform- we were working with multiple vendors and each had certain minimum volume commitments and different p ...Read More

A product usually graduates from the SMB mid-market customers to larger enterprise customers as it stabilises. Larger enterprises usually look for reference implementations before committing, which usually makes the overall sale that much harder. Some key features that usually cut across product modules that make a product enterprise-grade are: As employee roles & responsibilities tend to be defined in larger orgs, they usually look for granular and flexible user access controls and permissi ...Read More