What to Know About Enterprise Product Management

In this talk, Eric Menzie illustrates how to build good enterprise products, whether internally at a 200k+ employee organization, or, at an Enterprise Software Firm.

Eric Menzie

Eric Menzie serves as the Global Product Head for Evaluation solutions products at IHS Markit. During his term of more than 16 years in the financial services industry, Mr. Menzie has focused on sales, trading and research applications for global investment banking. He is a frequent speaker on financial services technology trends and enterprise product management. Prior to joining IHS Markit in 2017, Mr. Menzie led the entire Salesforce CRM build for Wells Fargo Securities that covered 30 lines of business and 1500+ users.

What is an Enterprise Product?

• Generally Expensive ($10,000 – $10M+ per year contract)

• High Expectations… and you have to meet them (legally)

• Short window for “experimentation” vs. a Consumer app

• Enterprise vs. Consumer reality check. “We’re not paying you to learn our business.”

Three Main Goals for Enterprise Software Built “In-House”

1. Make Money

2. Save Money

3. Operate more efficiently* 

*This helps #1 and #2

How to get things done within a 200K+ employee firm

• Get buy-in from and listen to stakeholders

• Get Quick Wins (can’t start chucking 3s at your first game)

• Find allies/power users (+Social Proof)

• Lead without authority

Three Main Goals for Enterprise “Vendor-Built” Software

1. Build products that solve actual user problems (painful ones) 

2. Sell them, learn, iterate, then expand the market (and sell more) 

3. World domination* 

*This helps #1 and #2

Selling Enterprise Products to Prospects/Clients

1. Know what impact your software is going to have on an organization, and

   know your audience 

2. Stakeholders are extremely important, but they are

   rarely your end users

Building Great Products as a Vendor or Internally

• Find out what really matters

• Save your product’s life by saying NO

• Know your user’s time

• Add value with your app, even for users who never log in!

• Your worst users give the best

  feedback

How to Get Better at Product Management?

Eric concludes by highlighting that one can always find the time to do things that they want to, and build things that they want to, illustrating the example of his own app with over a hundred downloads that he had developed and finally managed to publish on the Apple Store, overcoming many hurdles.