Customers have never held such sort of power in the marketplace that they exercise today.

They demand things from the market that suit their needs. They get things that are built for them, even down to the individual detail. This is the customer era or more specifically the end user era. This era that started in consumer markets is now upon us in the business markets.

We first saw its rumblings when consumer devices made their way into enterprises. Enterprises, as stiff as they were, did acknowledge the fierce nature of BYOD phenomenon and accommodated them as part of the desire and need of end users. Enterprises saw that their employees who were using next generation iPhones and Androids were never comfortable with the arcane and boring Blackberrys of the world. They were demanding the merger of consumer with corporate.

Cut to the present, a decade onwards, business prospects are demanding to see the products before they will ever take a meeting with a sales person. Prospects would like to try out products before they consider companies worthy of their time.

They are not impressed with our communication if it does not talk to their sense of self being, does not engage with their individual sense of expression. 

They want their products to talk to them, understand them and create experiences that are personalized to them. They are reluctant to spend their valuable hours describing their problems in great detail. They want companies to engage with them and understand their value system. They want their actions to speak louder than their words. 

They do not want to explain, they want to be understood.

This is a unique challenge to sellers and marketers. Sales and marketing teams now have to understand their prospects's wants and needs by becoming scarce yet acutely attuned to end users.

Most sales and marketing teams are now dependent on product generated insights to drive their engagements with the end users.

Onset of the Product Led Enterprise

This is what constitutes the unique opportunity for the product team to expand their meaning of end customers. 

While product teams are tasked to design the product for end customers, they have a new set of customers equally dependent on them. Sales teams would like product insights to guide their engagements, while marketing teams will use product insights to define their engagements with the end users. Customer success teams would like to use the same data to visualize and guide customers to success and support teams would like to imagine an intelligent system capable of self healing and self correcting itself.

This is a historical redefinition of the role of product teams. This is the product team’s opportunity to build out a product led enterprise.

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