early-adopter users from larger enterprise customers. Crossing this efficiently and quickly is key to winning your product category across the entire market. If you screw this up, your product will probably die. (Mine did.) @grinich
etc.) You have product-market fit. Users love your app. You have a tiny (or zero) sales team but are still growing revenue quickly from self-serve conversions. Everything is awesome! … right?! @grinich
new moat! Decrease customer churn — Enterprise has significantly better net dollar retention and predictable sales motions Expand market size (TAM) — SMB will run out of customers. Moving to enterprise has more headroom. Accelerate revenue growth = control your own destiny! @grinich
product and educate the market… … but a competitor is able to capture the lucrative enterprise segment first. (Extremely hard to recover.) vs vs @grinich
surface area for bugs. This means they take a long time (i.e. cash). Be prepared to invest. Make sure you have the runway! Slack PM: “I would guess we’ve spent $30M building enterprise features… and we’re probably only halfway done.” @grinich
dealing with legacy tech. Not visible to users, only visible to IT managers Not set up for glory/promotions (new feature vs. SAML auth) Hard to motivate your eng team and keep focus. Requires ongoing work and improvement. Not a single sprint. @grinich
shared customer need (good) Requires doing deep customer research with enterprise IT to collect requirements. Different from most PM jobs. Need to prioritize based on future potential customers, not only early-adopter enterprise customers. You are no longer the user. Your user is no longer the buyer. @grinich
a competitor will swoop in and take that market. (Probably for good.) If you don’t keep building end-user features, a new startup can pull users away with shiny new features. So you need to do both. This sucks and is very frustrating. (Sorry.) @grinich
your app Instrument events like “document.created” Match common schema (target, actor, action, meta) Searchable / filterable by IT admins Exportable to CSV, Splunk, S3 buckets @grinich
(IdP) Required to enforce their IT security policy Example providers: Okta, G Suite, ADFS (Microsoft), OneLogin, Ping, Gluu, WS02, Shibboleth, KeyCloak Consider also building SCIM & Azure AD support for automatic user provisioning/de-provisionin @grinich
Questionnaire (CAIQ) Center for Internet Security Critical Security Controls Shared Assessments Group Standardized Information Gathering Questionnaire Vendor Security Alliance Questionnaire (VSAQ) @grinich
structure and team management Change management Data retention/deletion Geographic data residency Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) Compliance (SOC-2, GDPR, ISO) Integrations (APIs) Encryption (EKM) Invoicing w/ payment via ACH SLAs w/ support Usage analytics and reporting @grinich