Episode Transcript
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You've just stepped into your new role as an enterprise
product manager. The title's shiny, the salary's
impressive, and your LinkedIn box is buzzing with
congratulations. But then you open your first
program board meeting, invite 20attendees, all with different
(00:22):
titles, different agendas. And as you'll soon discover very
different ideas about what your product should do, you'll be
listening to the marketing director talk about the brand
experience, the compliance officer warning about looming
regulations. The CIO will want to integrate 3
(00:44):
different existing platforms forcheap.
And somewhere in the corner, a finance manager is quietly
asking if this whole initiative can be done for half the budget.
By lunchtime, you realize that this isn't a product you're
managing. It's a political, technical and
operational ecosystem. And you're right in the middle
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of it. And while no one says it out
loud, you know if you can't deliver value here, it won't be
the product that fails. Your career may take the hit.
That's the reality of managing products in the enterprise
world. It's not the same as working a
small team or a start up or a side, a group within an
(01:31):
organization like an innovation team where you can move fast and
break things. And the enterprise you move
deliberately, You plan for scale, you play the long game,
you deal with legacy systems, complex processing and enough
stakeholders to fill a small theatre.
And you have to worry about operational support.
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But here's the thing, if you canmaster enterprise product
management, you'll gain the ability to influence at the
highest levels, steer multi $1,000,000 Rd. maps and shape
the customer experience for thousands, sometimes millions of
users. So today I'm going to share 10
things you need to know about managing products and an
(02:14):
enterprise. The Better Business analysis
institute presence, the Better Business analysis podcast with
Walsh Welcome back to the BetterBusiness analysis podcast with
your host, Benjamin Walsh. Now that was a big intro, bigger
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than usual because this is a bigtopic and like many of you, I
haven't had the official title of enterprise product manager.
However, I have been an enterprise product manager, if
you know what I mean. I've been managing products for
the enterprise level, external products.
And you might find yourself in asimilar role.
(02:55):
You might be a product manager, you might be ABR, you might be
in another role. And you need to know why the
enterprise is different to working in a small organization.
These are survival strategies, battle tested and boardrooms,
project war rooms and delivery standups across the corporate
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world. And my experience.
So let's dive in to these top 10tips that you need to know #1 is
that Enterprise Products are more than just features.
Think in terms of ecosystem, notisolated functionality.
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Really important. It's a difference here.
A new HR system and a governmentagency isn't just a digital
form. It impacts payroll, compliance
reporting, union agreements, andeven workforce morale.
Features are only valuable if they integrate into the existing
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business processes, right? Or, you know, the broad business
process some might need to change and they meet the broader
organization goals. Avoid focusing purely on the
shining object features without understanding systematic
impacts. So important map dependencies
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across systems before even committing to development or
even the project #2 is that yourstakeholders are a crowd, not a
committee. What I mean by that is that when
you build your stake on a map early and you should update it
often, you might find that thereare way more competing
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priorities in a larger organization.
OK. And there's a lot of politics at
play. An example here might be a
bank's mobile app, right? You're upgrading it, you have
different customers, branch managers, compliance officers,
IT, security, marketing and regulators all with different
must haves. So you need to expect competing
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priorities and resolving them aspart of your job.
Use personas to understand customer segments, stakeholder
motivations, the customer side, and you need to develop
communication plans that should be tailored and not
one-size-fits-all. What you can do here is use the
matrix between the effort required and the value for the
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customer and make sure that thatvalue aligns with your strategic
outcomes #3 this is so much moreimportant.
I know this is important everywhere now, but enterprise
is very, very important for storytelling.
Data will make or break your decisions.
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Treat product data like a strategic asset, not an
afterthought or just one of the measurables that you've got.
Have you had like a telecoms provider which wanted to reduce
churn by 15%? They might look at analyzing
call centre logs and usage patterns and they'll use that to
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redesign customer retention offers.
So they're using large data they've got, looking for
patterns and then coming up withtechniques to design something.
You need to know your products, data sources, quality and
ownership. That second one, that last point
is the most important, which is who owns the data.
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Sometimes no one does. So that might be your first
initiative. Decisions backed by evidence
gain faster buy in everywhere across the organization.
And another tip here is that that data is really could have,
you could have hedged on it. It could be really hard to
articulate. So don't go oh, well, you know,
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here's some numbers here, here'ssome percentage here.
Your executive team will need that summarized.
So use analytics and use dashboarding and use the data to
justify your road map prioritiesand post release improvement.
So what are you going to do next?
Number 4 is that your product road map right for your product
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or Rd. maps. If there's Rd. maps for each
feature must align to enterprisestrategy.
Every road map review you need to check that you're aligning
and this is where it came from your organization's strategic
objectives. You don't know what those are,
ask the executive team. The strategy is to improve
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customer self-service. Then your chat bot enhancements
should prioritize those over cosmetic UI changes.
I've posted a link today, LinkedIn today about how
important UX and UI is. So don't throw that away and and
make sure you've got some time to focus on that in a holistic
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way. But if you want to improve
customer service, you need to make sure that that UX is is
great. Link every major backlog item to
a strategic goal through strategic themes through your
epics. Ideally, avoid delivering high
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effort features that don't move your business forward or have a
high impact on a large amount ofyour users.
Now you will have raging fans who are users who love your
product and sometimes not all customers are equal.
But the feedback you get from there is less from the data and
more from these kind of one-on-one focus groups you can
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have that might be talking abouta future initiative.
You can use things like people giving customers the option of
writing on features so you can get their feedback and then they
can have ideas. But sometimes it might only be
10% of user base that want a feature.
And at the moment to to align with your strategic goals of
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growing more customers, you might need to focus on a feature
that's liked by more of your, I guess, mass market, OK.
Or that could be a feature that your competitor has that's done
really well. Keep executives engaged were
strategic alignment dashboards. So this is where the dashboards
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come in like the last point around data that you could
visualize it in terms of strategic objectives and then
show how your Rd. maps link to that.
Number 5 is that the backlogs orthe work queue is your
battlefield. You need to prioritize with this
way. If you're working in private
world, you can't do everything at once.
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If you've got you don't have enough in the backlog, then you
know you don't have enough insights.
And that's like a health system rollout.
Patient safety, right? Patient safety is a critical
item and it will trump non essential reporting features
every time, even if they're requested by senior staff.
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Apply scoring like Moscow. There are other scoring methods
out there that are quite good too.
Balance short term tactical winswith these long term strategic
investments. So you have both longer term
move the dial kind of stuff and then you have tactical wins that
might be smaller wins that get you up to there.
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Expect political priorities and make them transparent, but
sometimes they will drive your decisions if you like it or not.
Number six, product management is a team sport.
You can't do it alone, even if you're the lonely product
manager building relationships across delivery OPS business
units. If you're doing an ERP upgrade,
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it could succeed because the project manager and the product
manager and the BA and the DevOps team all work together
from day one. Delivery is never a solo effort.
Impairing your BAS designers andtesters is paramount.
You want them to be on board andalign with your product vision.
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Recognize and value contributions from non-technical
stakeholders too. So you focus groups, themes or
people from finance or whatever it is.
Make sure they feel involved too, as like this onion of
delivery, joint ownership of outcomes builds shared
accountability. So that's the outcome.
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But just be aware that you, if you've got a product owner or a
business owner, you probably only want one of those #7
compliance is part of the product, OK?
It's not. Don't just focus on all the cool
stuff. You need regulatory compliance.
Engage compliant compliance officers and security teams
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early. They're not blockers, they're
enablers. You need to look at it with that
mindset. If you had like an e-commerce
platform, you could avoid costlyrework by involving privacy
officers in the requirements phase, right?
Do that, don't do it at the end.Not just a sign off point.
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Regulation, security, privacy. They need to be baked in from
the start. Compliance work can be used as a
selling point for customer trust, and that's becoming more
and more critical with AI. And when there's more personal
information on the Internet, mapthose compliant checkpoints into
your delivery time and expect they might take a little while
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or cost you money #8 is that change management is non
negotiable. You need to treat user adoption
as a deliverable, not unlucky outcome.
Large insurer that I know that we're changing the claim system
and they failed because trainingwas optional.
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OK, you need to improve uptake, right?
And you, you do that by doing structured onboarding, whether
it's rolled out and getting people involved.
Communication, training, and support are all part of that
product life cycle, not someone else's responsibility.
Engage change managers early or own the role yourself in small
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organizations or hire one. But someone's got to own it.
You don't have a change manager,you own it.
Measure adoption and feedback right?
And not just go live dates. And of course, so if it's an
external product, you'd be measuring customer adoption, and
internally you'll be measuring user adoption #9 continuous
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improvement usually beats Big Bang releases.
You release small and fast and iterate.
This is after you've got your base product.
Just to be very clear here, if you have a public transport
ticketing system, we're rolling one out in New Zealand at the
moment. Contactless payments right
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across New Zealand and you do itin a pilot city.
First you iterate based on feedback and then you roll it
out nationally. But there is another dimension
to making sure that you have an Indian job to be done, finished.
So you've got to really understand what an MVP is.
That's a topic for another day. But you can't just roll out
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something that's not complete. When I say complete, that
doesn't mean all the features. It just means enough to for the
customer to complete their journey.
Large, infrequent releases carryhuge risk as you'll have
resistance too, because it was such a change that users won't
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necessarily adopt that change easily.
So slow changes use customer feedback loops to drive ongoing
enhancements. Make release and improvement
part of your culture, not the exception.
And I, this is just my recommendation, but like I said,
it's good to have a grounded product and then apply this
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continuous improvement on top ofthat, right?
And then, and you might have to do step changes when the
organization requires it, when there's a pivot, internal pivot.
I'm just going to talk about this before we move to number
10. So I'm going to check a product
out there, which is eBay. So we'll do about eBay and
Airbnb. EBNB has been known to change
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quickly, so the customers that use the Airbnb quite technically
literate and they expect change.Those who use eBay don't expect
much change and it's usually more of a mass market.
It's really interesting. We've got a product here in New
Zealand called Trade Me, which is the New Zealand eBay.
EBay doesn't even trade in New Zealand because Trade Me is so
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big anyway. That product and eBay both don't
change the UI much. They slightly change it over the
years. And to be honest, when you look
at eBay, you think it was made. You know, the first release was
like, you look at it and go, this is 1990s software, right?
But they are aware that if they made such a dramatic step
change, people wouldn't know what they were doing and they
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would risk losing customers #10 Your role is part visionary,
part translator. You speak business and take
fluently and know when to switch.
Very very similar to ABA role. A product manager explains API
interaction benefits right and integration benefits to
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executives in terms of revenue opportunities while discussing
data architecture trade-offs with the dev team so they
understand all the technical lingo and can work at different
levels, which sometimes ABA won't.
Get a seat at the executive table.
Tailor your message to the audience.
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Clarity over jargon always don'tsound smart.
Keep the product vision front and center, even in technical
debates, and be the bridge between strategy and execution.
Look, managing products in an enterprise isn't just about
building features, it's about orchestrating people, process
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compliant and strategy. Your job is to deliver long term
value. Keep these 10 essential tricks
in mind and you'll not just survive in enterprise product
management, you'll thrive and you'll probably be able to work
in product management in a startup or a small organization.
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I'll see you next week.