Product Discovery in B2B and B2B2C Environments: A Guide for Product Managers

Product discovery is a key stage in the product development lifecycle. It defines the problems potential users face and how the product could help solve them. However, in B2B and B2B2C businesses, this process has its own nuances. Examples of such businesses include Twilio, Workday, and Hubspot. A key difference in developing for these business models is that you sell to businesses and their stakeholders, not to actual end users. Essentially, you need to build a product that brings revenue and business results to stakeholders. However, solving end-user problems is crucial for achieving product results and driving business results. Understanding B2B Customer Persona Challenges: Stakeholders in B2B and B2B2C settings often have preconceived notions about their users' or employees' needs, based on their experiences or anecdotal evidence. While they may spend considerable time with them and understand their persona, this perception may lack the necessary depth and breadth to address the diverse needs of different user segments. For example, in employee training products, a stakeholder might favour specific training formats, like lengthy videos or text-only slides, believing them to be most effective. However, this approach might not consider the varied learning preferences and attention spans of a large employee base. These stakeholders, often preoccupied with their business responsibilities, might have limited availability, and their time is valuable. Involving them in research activities might take time. Solution: Engage client services, like customer success managers, to build a bridge of communication and trust with stakeholders. It's important for stakeholders to delegate the task of finding the right solution to the product team. Working with Stakeholders’ Feedback and Expectations Challenges: Securing time for user interview calls with stakeholders in the initial stages of product discovery can be daunting. If your company is still in the growth stage with a small to medium-sized customer base, securing only 3-5 interviews can take weeks, making the validation cycle for new product hypotheses lengthy. Conversely, some stakeholders are always willing to assist with product discovery and are easily accessible. They often have strong opinions and expectations about the user experience and feature set. This creates a challenge where the product team needs to navigate long feedback loops while addressing the expectations of the most loyal customers. Stakeholders might also have specific UI/UX feature requests based on their understanding of what's best for their users. While their input is valuable and can lead to quick wins and business expansion, it's crucial to broadly validate these ideas. Solutions: Product managers should focus on identifying and solving underlying problems and on improving key success metrics from the customer's perspective, rather than just reacting to requests. Recognise that the most enthusiastic or readily available customers might not always provide scalable insights or ones that apply to the broader user base. It's important to critically assess each piece of feedback and idea against a diverse range of use cases for its potential applicability and impact. Some product decisions will focus on stakeholders and their buy-in. However, it's crucial to strike a balance between stakeholder-driven and user-centric product decisions. Keeping customers informed and adopting a data-driven approach aids in making informed decisions that align with stakeholder expectations and cater to end-users' actual needs. Closely monitor product outcomes in relation to the identified key metrics for the customer. Building a Product for End Users Again, in B2B and B2B2C models, the stakeholders who influence purchasing decisions or product development are not the actual end-users. Challenges: The lack of product’s direct access to end users, especially in scenarios where products are integrated into other services or are white-labeled, complicates the ability to validate whether the product solves end users' real needs. Feedback mechanisms often become complex in these business models. End users typically report issues or suggestions to their organisations or immediate supervisors, not directly to the product team. Moreover, your direct contact at the customer company might try to resolve issues internally with a workaround. This indirect feedback loop can cause significant insights to be lost or diluted, especially regarding subtle yet crucial UX improvements. While you may be aware of major functional issues, you're less likely to know about poor UX flows. Solutions: Integrate direct user engagement tools within the product, such as interactive questionnaires, in-app feedback modules, or user forums. This direct communication enables the collection of firsthand user feedback, providing valuable insights into their experiences and needs. Develop and maintain an efficient, user-friendly feedback system, like a dedicated 'Help' or 'Feedback' feature within the product. This should be intuitive and effortless for users, encouraging them to share their experiences and suggestions. The feedback system should also be structured to minimise user effort and cognitive load, ensuring that providing feedback feels like a seamless part of the user experience. Tips for Organising Product Research in Restricted Conditions Seek feedback from at least 3-5 other customers to ensure solutions have broader applicability and aren't overly tailored to a few requests. If you secure a meeting or call with stakeholders, try to present a working prototype or a well-defined concept of the potential solution. While this might be poor practice for B2C products, in B2B and B2B2C environments with long feedback cycles, it's advantageous not to wait weeks for another meeting to demo something. Prioritise and heavily rely on quantitative data for decision-making where possible, especially when direct qualitative feedback is limited or challenging to obtain. Quantitative data from user analytics, surveys, or market research provides objective insights that complement the subjective nature of qualitative feedback. Remember that UI experiments are costly. Sometimes, it's more pragmatic to implement any effective solution that addresses the problem, rather than striving for a perfect UI/UX design that may not significantly impact overall product effectiveness. While prioritising stakeholder interests in some decisions is inevitable, they should not detract from the overarching goal of delivering value to end-users. Conclusion In the complex world of B2B and B2B2C product development, successful product discovery depends on a deep understanding of both stakeholder expectations and end-user problems. Product managers and teams must adopt a strategic, empathetic, and data-driven approach to ensure that developed solutions align with business objectives and genuinely address end-users' needs and preferences. Editor: Tanya Kamenskaya Design: Stas Yudin