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They have product managers doing product management; you're no longer the audience. Mature Enterprise products will have so many obscure and random features th
by solatic 2y ago
They have product managers doing product management; you're no longer the audience.
Mature Enterprise products will have so many obscure and random features that you practically need certification to understand all of them; but most end-users are not supposed to understand all of them. They just want to understand the ones that affect them. The fact that the features offered are maybe 50% as good (if that) as the ones offered by competing products is completely besides the Actual Value Proposition available to users who get hired to work inside BigEnterprise, which is the following choice:
a) Use a 50%-as-good product that is already installed and supported and by internal team;
b) Take the hard road to try to get a new product in: find the budget for a new product, convince the internal (IT?) team to install and maintain it, get them to integrate it with the rest of the BigEnterprise's systems (at least stuff like user management and sending emails), get the new product through Procurement processes.
Is it any wonder that 99% of the time, BigEnterprise employees choose (a) ?
Product strategy when selling to these customers is: be the default choice, not the best choice. Get internal enterprise users to keep choosing (a). Eventually, so much internal enterprise usage depends on 50%-utility features, that anyway the system becomes nearly impossible to rip out, and then you can start to put in yearly price increases that they can't stop paying.
As long as you have a mainline feature that is best-in-class to get your foot in the door with new customers (so that their users can start using the 50%-utility features), you have a coherent product strategy. GitLab's best-in-class mainline feature is the combination of Git repository hosting + GitLab CI; their closest competitor is GitHub Enterprise which is more expensive (also GitHub Actions sucks), and Bitbucket is a sad joke.