“Most profitable B2B businesses can be summarized as ‘doing boring things for boring people’”. This recent LinkedIn post by former PROW speaker Mirela Mus was an amusing reminder that the products most of us consider “sexy” are definitely more Meta than Salesforce. In other words, product management is still widely associated with consumer apps.
The majority of thought leadership reflects this bias. It applies to PMs working on viral products with millions of users and hyper growth. But being a PM in B2B is a different ball game and can often feel like you’re doing it “wrong”. For a junior PM eager to apply Marty Cagan’s playbook, it can be particularly shocking to face the day-to-day reality of an old-school, sales-led enterprise. So here’s what to expect if you’re thinking of joining a B2B company.
Users vs. Buyers
In B2C, your user and your buyer are the same person. The path to success is fairly straightforward: delight your audience and they’ll download, subscribe, or buy your product. In B2B, the people signing the contracts are usually executives or procurement, while the end-users are buried deep in a department. As a PM, you need to understand the business context and goals of the buyer who funds the deal, while also delivering a product that the user will love enough to keep using in the long run.
Experimentation & Iteration Speed
B2C PMs are under constant pressure to move KPIs and optimize funnels, so they launch fast, test, tweak, and repeat. The stakes are relatively low if a feature flops because they can roll it back and try again, which means fast learning cycles. In B2B, large deployments, complex integrations, and multi-year contracts make it riskier - and slower - to experiment live.
Many organisations are also very wary of shipping lean MVPs for fear that barebones features will scare clients or leak to competitors. As a result, the team is expected to get it right from the get-go. This means upfront discovery and validation work, often based on limited inputs and a lot of assumptions, followed by “agile” development that can look a lot like waterfall.
Quantitative vs. Qualitative Data
When your product has millions of users, you can splice and dice data in endless dashboards and gain insights quickly by conducting A/B tests. In B2B, customer feedback tends to come from a handful of accounts, advisory boards, or the sales team relaying “what the client wants/needs” while sometimes downright blocking PMs from speaking with customers directly. While selling higher-value deals to fewer clients leads to deeper customer relationships, much of the feedback in B2B is qualitative, and therefore biased. Big clients have the power to dominate your roadmap simply because your company cannot afford to say no to their requests, though some B2B PMs argue that a client-driven roadmap is actually positive because it means guaranteed new revenue.
Stakeholder Management & Product Mindset
One of the biggest differences between B2C and B2B product management comes down to stakeholders and product mindset maturity. In B2C, a PM’s hardest challenge is usually prioritization: deciding which features will have the biggest impact at scale. In B2B, especially in organisations with long histories, you inherit silos, legacy structures, and the occasional HIPPO (highest-paid person’s opinion). Here, success depends more on your ability to influence, align, and build trust with your stakeholders without rocking the boat too much.
Even in modern B2B companies, you’re constantly balancing competing agendas. Sales pushes for new features to close deals. Engineering wants to maintain architectural integrity. And you’re the supposed keeper of the product vision in the middle, trying to ensure that the roadmap serves both the company’s long-term strategy and the customers’ real needs.
The Bottom Line
Product management - whether in B2C or B2B - is about solving problems that matter (even boring ones!). On paper, the role is the same: identify customer needs, prioritize ruthlessly, build solutions that users love. In reality, the day-to-day, the pace, and the definition of success can be radically different. Knowing these tradeoffs upfront can help you choose the path that resonates most with you.
