AMA: GitLab Director of Product Management, Jacqueline Porter on Enterprise Product Management

SMB, or small-medium business, and enterprise segments may have different requirements along a few dimensions: 1. Scale - how much of a load a system needs to handle 2. Concurrency - how many of a single event at one time needs to be supported 3. Fit and Finish - how comprehensive and complete are the experiences 4. Ecosystem support - how extensive is the list of integrations required to support the JTBD for the target For the enterprise segment, they will often have the extreme of the highest requirements on these dimensions while SMBs will have the lower end of those requirements. When designing and planning features you can research if certain demands are required for each segment to meet their needs appropriately.

This is a great question! In the 5 B2B enterprise SaaS organizations I have worked practiced no custom development! Although we may build specific features for target customers and in that case, each company has done this differently and all of the strategies have pros and cons. My favorite method is to have each product group or squad dedicate a portion of their roadmap to support revenue or Paid Monthly Active users. In practice, this would look like making sure the capacity of the engineering group is planned to take care of SLO-bearing work first: * Bugs * Security vulnerabilities * Availability bugs Next, the remaining capacity would be allocated per the product manager's KPIs these product groups will be incentivized on different metrics but some of these can be: 1. % growth of paid account adoption - shipping features and issues that will drive paid adoption 2. New logo win rate - shipping features and issues that will close the gaps with competition 3. Reduce churn and contraction - shipping issues that target reasons accounts cancel

Product managers can be particularly useful thought leaders when impacting deals. Most importantly, in strategic deals it helps to have someone advocating and explaining the product that is not a sales person - because the customer or prospect feels they can trust the expert and not feel like they are being sold to. In this situation, you can represent a vision and product depth while also doing early selling.

My answer would be don't balance it - just sell what you have. The most successful product-led companies I have been at are ones that are not chasing a vision of what was sold to a customer but can focus on building a vision that is compelling and solves real problems for the customer and market. Maybe the question is, how do I get my sales team to sell what we have? 1. Create usecase based wins and artifacts showcasing your product in winning position 2. Deeply understand where the sales teams are losing deals and feeling pressure. Create content ahead of that pressure and enable the team to articulate the value without needing to sell vaporware 3. Create battle cards against incumbents 4. Create bite-sized sayings that sales teammates can repeat in deals to showcase the value of the product via real customers/case studies (anonymized or legally approved customer case studies)

Product managers often get to make massive impacts when there is product market fit - regardless of segment. With enterprise products, sometimes seeing those impacts can take awhile depending on the product, vehicle for consumption, deal cycles, and sales process.

I have not been in an organization that used size segments for Product Manager hiring. As a result, I would imagine I would leverage the same key traits I look for in all PMs I hire: 1. Bias for action - proactively seeks to implement solutions for our customers' and users' pain points 2. Starts small - Interest in making as little of a disruption to the customer's workflow while improving the quality of life and business results 3. Awareness - this is broad self-awareness and situational awareness. A product manager is often thrust into ambiguous complex situations - I look for empathasizers who are ultra results-oriented to get to a solution quickly with as minimal collateral damage as possible 4. Technical Acumen - Being able to dive deep and grasp complex topics quickly is a hallmark success point for any PM to me!