It's about probabilities and risks shifting. My understanding after selling software to enterprise is that 1. they are risk averse, they prefer a solution tha

It's about probabilities and risks shifting. My understanding after selling software to enterprise is that 1. they are risk averse, they prefer a solution that will improve by 0.1% the [whatever metrics they care about] with 0% chance of failure than one with over 9000% improvement and a 1% chance of failure. 2. To be sure of 1) they want a) a track record of success (the famous, "what are your other enterprise client") b) they have a loooong selling process where you will need to talk to their security team, their legal team, their change management team etc. 3. They have complex rules inherited from dozen of years of internal politics, merge and acquisition, half-done transition and they are not ready to change for you. (because the last time they did, it ended badly) 4. For the same reason they have a complex ecosystem of software that has not been made to intercommunicate with others, so your software will need to do excel export, talk to SFTP, talk to SOAP services, talk to system in COBOL where you must be sre that the field X can not exceed 5 digits in decimal representation. 5. They want to be sure you will still be alive in 5 years This being said , it means the vital part to be a enterprise software company is 1. you need a team that knows how to navigate their process, and not only your sales teams, you need technical guys , product guys that knows how to talk to a security team, the enteprise IT team 2. you need a technical team that will not laugh or flee when you will tell them to create a SOAP connector 3. you need to have more than 2 years of runaway (otherwise you will not having finished half of the sales process ) 4. you need a final software that does what they pay you for (in case of a payroll software: one that is able to generate a correct payslip ) with 0 risk of risks for them (you can have bugs , if you have a good insurance :) ) these things exists independently of the UX for the final user. One can even say it makes it harder, because making things simple is harder for hard things, and sorry but if you tell me the project is going to be 2 month longer because we will tweak the UX with end users , in addition to all the meetings are done, I will remove this step. so it means you can't have an enterprise with good UX without the proverbial soap connector, but the opposite can exists, which means at the end pure math dictate that you will see a lot of enteprise software with poor UX.