Early stage enterprise product management, requirements and roadmaps

Learning from Origin Benefits.

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I’ve been spending a good deal of writing time lately discussing M&A deals and playing former industry pundit. I’ve been meaning to write something about product management again (cos I’m also a former product exec). When I saw a video from Chris and Pete at Origin Benefits, I figured it was well worth sharing.

How it usually works in incumbent-shire

In an established enterprise software company, gathering customer requirements is generally not a challenge (there are many other challenges). Your existing customers generally do a mighty fine job of telling you what needs fixing, often loudly and firmly. Your salespeople will also have long lists of oft changing wishes and threats, and SI consultants will happily blog up lists of things they would change if only they were product managers, and encourage their customers to nag you about these. Your support people are a wealth of genuinely valuable information. Analysts will have learned opinions but zero grasp of engineering constraints. If the product is reasonably modern, your observability tools will be a useful requirements source too.

Your challenge is to seek patterns, collate, placate, sequence, accelerate, and sometimes delay and avoid. Like it or not, a lot of your R&D capacity will be focused on this long list of gripes and ideas. If you can prioritize the most impactful ones, you will generally have happy customers, but you’ll never nail every one of these, as the list of things you can improve is endless. Transparency and communication are vital. It’s sensible to follow a consistent methodology, and have robust decision processes. Facts are your ally.

If you are smart, you will have an advisory counsel of about a dozen top customers, with deeply engaged HR tech leaders that help you make better big rock decisions. These groups are gold when they work well. What’s especially hard is to carve out roadmap capacity to do something new and imaginative (please read Escaping the Build Trap).

Acquisitions become attractive, in part because it enables you to reset roadmap parameters. See last couple of weeks in incumbent-shire.

In start up land, you have a different challenge

If you are a seed startup targeting the enterprise you don’t actually have many detailed requirements and feature demands. Your capacity to innovate isn’t constrained by technical debt or 1000s of ‘high priority’ feature enhancements. You have a bunch of ideas of what you think might work, but not much clarity. And if you aren’t careful you get trapped into building what your first customer demands, rather than what the broader ICP needs. The first customer hostage situation is real, and often deadly. If you are building an AI centric product, it is vital to get access to great data to build your models early on.

For Chris and Pete, Origin Benefits isn’t their first rodeo. They built a mightily successful global benefits business with Darwin. They have also learnt that building with AI for the enterprise isn’t about building in a cave, but in genuine partnership with their customers.

From early on, they knew that its very powerful if you can bring several companies along with you in a co-creation journey. It sounds lovely, but it is hard to do. In this video they discuss how they go about this.

Convincing the large enterprises companies to commit to paying you and working with you without you having a pre-defined roadmap sounds daunting. And it is. But if you are solving a big enough problem it is the best way a compelling product. Get really smart, committed people in a room and listen really well.

Chris noted:

At our first client event in Miami at the start of this year, we brought all our co-creators together for three days of open discussion. We listened, recorded everything, and captured every perspective. By the end of the event, we had a clear, collective roadmap and mandate to move forward. Our clients weren’t just consumers of our product - they were co-architects of it.

The speed of development in start-ups today means that the feedback loop with earlier adopters is a lot tighter than in incumbent land. This is a massive advantage.

We are also not quite sure how all this AI stuff works yet, so the more open-ended and collaborative you can be, the fewer surprises.

Chris and team will sharing more about their co-creation process, I’ll update the post when they do.

More about why we invested in Origin Benefits here.

As I usually do, I’ll add tune to wrap things up. Here’s one of favourite bands, The Housemartins.

And because I can, here’s a bonus. Mitski is awesome, this her latest.