B2B vs B2C Product Management: 4 Hidden Differences to Know

What hidden differences can we point out about B2B product management compared to a B2C environment?

While many similarities and differences are well-known across the tech industry, many product managers ponder on whether one or the other are a better fit for them. It’s a fair analysis.

Typically, while many PMs jump between the two fields evenly, some are advised to stick to one or the other for sake of concentration. Of course, if you’re relatively junior in your PM career, exploring both sides of the coin (B2B vs B2C) helps diversify your experience and enables you to decide which one you’d be a better fit for.

That being said, let’s dive into four hidden differences — perhaps nuances so-to-speak — to really help new PMs grasp where they truly fit.

1. B2B can involve more “top-down” guidance from leadership.

The realm of B2B involves direct engagement with clients/customers on a daily basis — and it’s not even a contest. If your clients or customers aren’t satisfied with your product, it’s essentially game over. The relationships you build over time with these clients are what keeps your own business afloat and enables competitive advantages, even if your product may be inferior compared to a direct competitor’s.

Thus, leadership is just as involved in the customer engagement process as the product team. While B2C relies on the product team to truly understand customer and user pain points, a B2B environment calls for leadership to provide guidance and structure for how a product is delivered to customers — especially long-time clients with 10+ years of established relationships.

B2B PMs who are okay with leadership guidance should embrace this culture. Don’t be afraid to lean on managers and directors for their support when it comes to establishing those relationships, and in return, the leadership team will fully trust you to deliver those features and solutions that their customers truly need.

2. B2B will involve more webinars, deep dives, and client presentations.

While this initially sounds like a no-brainer, let’s discuss the trickle-down effect it applies.

Product managers are often expected to act as their respective domain’s “subject matter expert” (SME). In a B2C setting, this could mean a PM would have to collaborate with their Marketing divisions or conduct some product marketing and evangelism themselves. They’re also expected to answer questions from their peers or other acquaintances about their product or problem spaces. It’s normal. But in a B2B setting, being the SME involves different applications of such.

First, B2B PMs may have to focus on being a SME but consider their customer scenarios more heavily. For example, if a client is only using your B2B product for a niche use case such as using a specific API, then the PM needs to consider the problem space from their client’s point of view.

What challenges does our API post for this specific customer and their industry? Any way we can design something that’s more of a “white glove” solution just for this customer, while not jeopardizing our general product?

Another thing to consider is the type of evangelism. B2C PMs often send out newsletters, release updates, marketing posts, and host once-in-a-while deep dive video meetings to go over how their product solves a specific user need. B2B PMs, while perhaps doing similar activities, are geared more for client-specific webinars and presentations that might even resemble that of a consultant’s. There’s a critical opportunity to strengthen their business relationship between their own company and their client’s. This means that PMs always have to think from a specific standpoint:

What’s the best way to host a webinar to strengthen our relationship? Should I focus on the general product or hone-in on a specific use case that our client cares about more than others?

3. User research and feedback is easier for B2C.

Now before you flame me for the controversial take, here is the point I’m trying to drive across: B2C customers typically amount to a larger use base (or potential user base), and thus user experiments are easier to quantify.

Of course, this isn’t always true. For large B2B companies, if you sell software to a client with thousands of employees, than boom, you’ve acquired thousands of new users by the agreement of a single contract, and they can be your source of testing new features with.

But more often than not, there exists less accessibility for A/B testing or metric-guidance. In a B2B environment, while you have easy access to your closest customers or business partners and can view how they use your product, revenue is often the closest north star metric. You often hear claims such as, “Who cares if our product usability sucks, if our clients find use out of it still and pay us?”

We can summarize this into two main reasons:

1. The nature of B2B means a “customer” and a “user” are different. The customer provides the product revenue, while the user provides the feedback. This can make user feedback harder to acquire and analyze due to this barrier, and product improvement is based on revenue and customer relationships rather than other engagement metrics.

2. Business customers could be less incentivized to invest in having their users provide feedback, and likewise, the product team providing the solution could also be less incentivized to invest in seeking the feedback. Now obviously, this isn’t what happens for all business partners. But think about it — if your B2B company is earning the revenue as long as their clients are getting value out of your product, why dig into all these complicated metrics — especially if a user base is only in the hundreds or thousands?

4. Contrary to popular belief, B2B can be riskier than B2C.

There’s a few reasons why. While obviously B2C means it may take more work to pull users from acquisition to revenue, B2B relies on customer relationships which can easily go sour. Even if a broader user base likes a PM’s product, if the customer — AKA buyer — doesn’t, then it could go down the drain.

There are many famous failed B2B startup examples to stem from, starting with this list here. Just look at this failed case with ScaleFactor, a B2B bookkeeping software startup that provided subpar services to its customers. While the initial idea of using AI and automation for bookkeeping was great, which drove the acquisition of clients steadily, the product itself was of poor quality, and perhaps the initial revenue provided by its early customers made the startup founders more complacent. This ultimately led to them neglecting the quality of their services.

B2C is obviously hard too with the early acquisition of users being a huge challenge in a saturated tech world. But B2B is no different with its emphasis on customer relationships and easiness of product neglect.

About Me

My name is Kasey. I’m passionate about writing, product management, and storytelling. I’m one of the leaders of PM Hive, a PM community.

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