New white paper: 4 enterprise challenges you didn’t know your product could solve

When you’re a small company or startup, taking risks, moving fast, and iterating quickly are the norm. At this size, it’s also easier to connect with customers directly to test your hypotheses or validate your decisions—allowing you to pivot and adjust your strategy on relatively short notice. 

But when you’re operating at enterprise scale, all of these processes become a little more complicated.

With more stakeholders involved, decisions slow and silos emerge. Changes in trajectory take longer to build consensus around—and more energy to bring to fruition. And while larger companies generally have more resources at their disposal, the way those resources are used is examined much more closely, making it necessary for teams to find ways to build cost-efficient, scalable, and repeatable processes.

Our latest white paper, Four enterprise challenges you didn’t know your product could solve, explores the common struggles large businesses and enterprises face, and examines how product-led tactics help mitigate them.

Challenge #1: Balancing stability and agility

By nature, big businesses move more slowly than their small and scrappy counterparts. They’re also typically more mired in bureaucracy and layers of approvals that must be met before projects can even begin. Large companies are often heavily siloed, too, making it difficult for teams to work cross-functionally or to feel as though their efforts are contributing to the same, shared outcomes. But enterprise-scale organizations can start to overcome these hurdles by unifying their teams around a product-led strategy:

• Roadmaps help communicate the product’s long-term strategy and vision, align internal teams, and prioritize cross-functional initiatives
• Product analytics helps teams across the business (like marketing, customer success, or sales) understand behavioral trends so they can adjust their engagement strategies appropriately
• In-app guides allow the company to communicate urgent or important messages to customers or internal employees so they can stay ahead of issues that might otherwise cause irreparable frustration

Challenge #2: Selling and appealing to many audiences

Enterprise-scale organizations rarely ever sell to a single audience or persona group. Their marketing campaigns, sales processes, onboarding motions, and support programs must appeal to a broad array of user types across many roles and business functions. The same is true for internal IT teams: as the organization grows, IT teams must meet the needs of more diverse roles (all with varying needs and degrees of technical proficiency). Product-led tactics can help businesses of all sizes cater to these different personas and perspectives.

• Segmentation allows product-led companies to be extremely targeted in their messaging and usage analysis so they can personalize the user experience
• Product-led initiatives like product tours, free trials, and freemium packages allow users to experience the product for themselves, on their own terms, based on the tasks that matter most to them—all while freeing up sales teams to focus their time on their highest value opportunities
• In-app messaging allows teams to engage and provide support to specific groups efficiently, without bombarding other unaffected users with communications that aren’t relevant to them

Challenge #3: Becoming efficient but not impersonal

Historically, routine activities like onboarding, support, and feedback solicitation have relied on human-led, 1:1 attention. As companies expand, product portfolios become more sophisticated, and the demand for resources grows, teams need ways to continue delivering the same quality of care—but in more scalable, repeatable ways—all while making customers and employees feel heard and valued. Product-led companies bring many of the manual and repetitive tasks they previously relied on their people to complete, inside the product. This helps them:

• Share the most resonant and relevant message possible using in-app guides—capturing their users’ attention while they’re actively engaged with the product itself
• Provide highly contextual support or guidance, with targeted information for specific users and user types
• Gather feedback and social proof in an unobtrusive way to streamline product innovation and sales  

Challenge #4: Making the best use of data

Effectively managing data (and determining the right actions to take on it) is a common problem faced by companies of all sizes. But at enterprise scale, this challenge is compounded as the number of tools used across the organization grows and the volume and variety of information collected expands—ultimately resulting in “analysis paralysis” and forcing teams to make decisions from different sources of truth. By taking a product-led approach, enterprise organizations put their product and all the data associated with it at the center of their business strategy, so they can deliver a more cohesive experience.

• Product analytics creates a common language teams across the business can use to understand and influence the product experience in a consistent and unified way
• Qualitative feedback adds critical context to usage analytics; drives fast, data-informed innovation; and ensures internal teams are focused on the right things 

Want to learn more about how product-led strategies help enterprise teams overcome their most common challenges? Click here to download the full white paper.