What are skill gaps that a B2B product manager could improve on to become more consumer-focused?

Part of what drew me to Consumer Product and why I love it so much is that as individuals, we are all consumers. I studied Consumer Marketing and Consumer Psychology as an undergrad and I've always been fascinated by why people make the decisions they do with their time, money and attention. So, as a consumer yourself in many cases as a PM it can be easier to more deeply understand your customer, even if you are not the target user for your product.

In B2B, PMs also deeply understand their users, but typically in the context of their livelihood - how your product helps them more effectively do their job or run their business. As a result the needs can be complex, and product behaviors are often driven by a myriad of factors that may or may not be linked to that end user's individual behaviors and preferences. The typical competitor products and differentiators might be more focused on advanced capabilities like security, or financial data, or workflows.

As a result some B2B product managers may have less familiarity with consumer attitudes, shifting preference, the bar for great product and the very large competitor set you're dealing with when trying to earn an incremental visit, time spent or transaction. The good news is that this is an addressable skill gap.

When I interview B2B PMs looking to move to consumer, I look for strong product intuition - do they understand why the best consumer products and consumer product businesses today excel? Can they brainstorm how they would improve my product? Can they form creative hypotheses and rapidly provide perspective on who the likely customer for a product would be and why? These behaviors (alongside all the core must have's of a great PM -strategic and analytic thinking, communication, leadership, and more) demonstate that a B2B PM could make the jump.

If a B2B PM is interested in switching, I'd encourage them to spend time studying consumer products - analyze them, tear them down and try to back into why certain things are being built. Spend time thinking about your own product choices and how you'd like to see the products improve. This practice will enable you to demonstrate that while you may not have worked with this customer before - you a foundation to quickly get up to speed.

One key skill gap that is quickly closing but still exists is the ability to creatively solve holistic problems for customers. The challenge is B2B PMs often times work so closely with customers that its hard to resist just building exactly what the customer is asking for. The challenge is products become unweidly w/o having a POV on how to syntesize multiple asks into thematic areas and then creatively solve those problems so the product can scale.   

What I've found is the breakdown is not on the PM's creative problem solving skills but instead

• Creative collaboration: PMs need to foster a creative collaborative environment with their Eng and Design partners to embrace the up front customer problem and truly try to solve those problems together vs. just delivering the literal ask.
• Thinking at-scale: Consumer PMs because they are focused on growing user numbers to astronomical heights tend to always think at scale. B2B PM's with a clearer line of sight to near term revenue or growth goals, often times dont naturally prioritize higher investments in growth.

B2B and B2C PM’s bring very different strong suits. It’s not to say one is better than the other, but they come with different competencies.

I’ve observed that B2B PMs are systems thinkers. They think end to end and consider what it takes to build a robust business at scale. This runs the full spectrum from security to payments to tools for administration and operations. This is a great skill set in a world where many businesses are moving online and there’s a high impetus for trusted and safe environments.

What I think B2B PM’s don’t have the opportunity to necessarily experience are the end users pain-points and journeys. Enterprise products, by design, are purchased/licensed to run a business. Consumer products are sought out by and paid for by individual users to fill an unmet need. So if you are a B2B PM looking to transition to B2C, I encourage you to find a product that meets an unmet need for you, and teardown the product to understand what approach you’ll take if you were building it from scratch. Or better still, work on a new product idea for a problem you yourself run into.

The other area is A/B testing. B2B products don’t always led themselves to A/B testing and iteration. So for PMs looking to transition, I’d say learn as much as you can about A/B testing -- when does it make sense (or not), how do you build hypotheses, how do you set up test cells and when do you decide to call (launch) a test.