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What qualities in a B2B product manager do you think are applicable to Consumer Product Management?

2 Answers
Roshni Jain
Roshni Jain
Volley Head of Product/VPJanuary 28

This is linked to the other question, so I'll be brief here. The vast majority of fundamental PM skills are transferable regardless of B2B, B2C or platform focused work. By fundamental skills I mean 

  • Leadership and communication - the ability to lead through influence, work with engineers, designers and many other functions and very strong verbal and written communication. PMs are the spokesperson for their product and they must have excellent communication to build the credibility they'll need to move their products forward.
  • Product strategy - critical and analytical thinking, product sense, business sense and the ability to bring all of this information together to build a strong strategic approach to your product
  • Prouct execution - ability to work across complexity, unexpected challenges and find a way to make things happen with high quality in acceptable time frames

If a PM has these down solid - they can transfer to a different type of customer. The biggest differences a PM may find is that the pace of consumer product may be faster as there is a large scale and can be easier to make adjustments to a consumer experience than a large worrkflow. They may find the complexity of execution varies between B2B and B2C products. They are also likely to find it easier to find and interact with users, and see data and results faster as well. 

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Jeff Chow
Jeff Chow
InVision CEO (former CPO)March 23

As I mentioned in the past question, B2B PM's are very good at the nuances of product priortiization given the additional dimensions coming from larger more influential customers. The healthy tension of near term revenue vs. overall growth truly helps a PM be stronger at prioritization.

Related, many B2B PMs are very well versed at listening to the customer. This may be sitting in on a sales or customer success call or just hearing from account teams specific feature requests from customers. Often times consumer product deals with large audiences where you can lose sight of the actual user vs. the large numbers or overly rely on synthesized insights from research.

B2B PMs also have a lot more practice internally to work on communication. Translating features for sales and customer success every day helps hone communication skills and how you have to adapt to different audiences and contexts.

To be clear, all of these skills (prioritization, customer centricity, communication) are a necessity for a Consumer PM to succeed, but I've found that in the B2B space there's a more natural path to honing those skills.  

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