OrangeScape Blog Consumerization of enterprise

Enterprise software used to suck. The user experience used to be pathetic. You’re sure to have wondered about the possible reason behind those awfully bad product designs.Things have started to change. Enterprise tech is getting better. But why did it suck in the first place? — The answer as Jason Fried of Basecamp points out is that the buyers weren’t the users. The focus of B2B software companies then was to win the buyers with feature lists, future promises, and buzz words and not the actual users who used their product.The past decade, however, has seen a fundamental shift in the way enterprise software is getting sold. The shift is from a ‘management decides-IT installs’ top-down selling model to an ‘employees adopt-management buys’ bottom-up model. Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures calls it the B2C2B model, a go-to-market framework made popular by companies such as Dropbox, Zoom, and Slack.If a significant number of employees (consumers) within an organization can be made to adopt a product then it becomes eventually easier to convert the entire organization into a paying customer. IBM’s recent decision to go with Slack as its companywide internal communication tool for all its 350,000 employees is a notable case in point, as internal teams at IBM reportedly have been using the chat app from as far back as 2014. This is not just proving to be true for SaaS players but there is a growing influence of end-users in the purchasing decisions of PaaS and IaaS solutions too. Enterprise tech companies have thus started to bet on the virality of adoption of their products as a viable go-to-market strategy.Now, what does this mean for enterprise product design? — The emphasis has now shifted towards pleasing the end-user and an ever-increasing proportion of these end-users are digital natives who are born and raised in a world of rich and sophisticated consumer tech.The user experience expectations of your enterprise solution may not just be influenced by your direct competitor’s offering but more so by the latest trends in the consumer tech world. Barring certain habit-forming aspects of consumer product design, there is no reason for enterprise product design philosophy to be any different from its consumer counterpart.This consumerization paradigm is beginning to affect every aspect of an enterprise software business from product design to marketing to sales. The line differentiating a consumer and enterprise tech business is increasingly becoming blurred.In the end, employees are people too.Consumerization of enterprise was originally published in Behind the Peel on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.