The Dirty Secret of B2B Product Management
- blogs, product management
- 4 min read
Author: Arnould Maren Joseph – Product Marketer
You Are Building for Two Different People. Most Teams Only Know One of Them.
Here is the situation that plays out, quietly and repeatedly, in B2B product organisations across every industry.
The product team has spent months building a feature. They have user stories, design reviews, sprint demos, and a launch plan. The sales team closes the deal. The contract gets signed. The product goes live. And then, three months later, the adoption numbers come back, and they are terrible. The feature barely gets used. The customer is not churning yet, but they are not happy. The renewal conversation is going to be hard.
What went wrong?
In most B2B product post-mortems, the answer circles around implementation issues, onboarding gaps, or a training problem. These are real. They are also symptoms. The actual root cause is almost always something that was set in motion before a single line of code was written: the team built for the buyer, understood the buyer’s priorities deeply, and barely knew the person who was going to use the product every day.
This is the divided constituency problem. And it is the defining structural challenge of B2B product management that almost nobody talks about with the directness it deserves.
The buyer and the user are almost never the same person
The IT and procurement departments are normally responsible for purchasing software on behalf of the enterprise, and they use an IT scorecard to assess potential solutions. That scorecard does not include usability, because these are not factors that affect IT or procurement directly. The end users and their projected experiences with the product are simply not involved in the buying decision.
That is a structural gap, not an oversight. The people who have the authority to sign a contract are considering a product based on measurements with little relevance to how this product will feel when used for eight hours a day. They are considering if it fits into their current infrastructure, the total cost of ownership, compliance, security certifications, and if the vendor will still be around in 5 years. Technical leaders often value detailed feature discussions, while CIOs and procurement leaders focus on business benefits and product vision.
In B2B, it is often all about features and checkboxes rather than aesthetics, presentation, and ease of use. Business buyers are hiring your product to solve a problem rather than provide an experience. The enterprise product buyer is rarely the actual end user of that product. In some cases, they could not care less about how delightful the user experience is.
The end user, who logs onto the platform each morning, the analyst who has to open the platform each morning, the sales rep who should be recording all the calls, and the operations manager who should be running the weekly report are interested in different things. They care about whether the tool is fast. Whether it fits into their existing workflow. Whether they can do the thing they need to do in three clicks or thirty. Whether it makes them feel more capable at their job or more frustrated.
Understanding the buyer without the user produces software that is easy to sell and hard to use. The product wins the deal and loses the renewal. It checks the procurement scorecard and fails the adoption test. It looks like a success in Q1 and becomes a difficult conversation in Q4.
What the data says about how common this is
The average B2B purchase now involves 13 internal stakeholders and 9 external participants, up from prior years, with public sector purchases averaging 14 internal stakeholders. The buying committee is not a single decision-maker. It is a loose coalition of people with different titles, different priorities and different definitions of success. Gartner research reveals that 74% of B2B buyer teams demonstrate unhealthy conflict during decision processes. The root cause is misaligned priorities across stakeholders. CFOs prioritise ROI and cost containment. IT leaders demand security and integration capabilities. End users want ease of use.
A product team trying to serve all of them simultaneously is not doing product management. They are doing politics with a backlog.
86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process, and 81% of buyers are dissatisfied with the provider they ultimately chose. That second number is the one worth sitting with. More than four out of five B2B buyers end up unhappy with what they bought. This is not primarily a sales problem or a marketing problem. It is a product problem. The gap between what was promised in the demo and what was experienced in daily use is where that dissatisfaction lives.
Forrester estimates that demo experiences overstate actual usability by 300 to 400 percent. The vendor shows the buyer the happy path, the ideal user journey where everything works perfectly. The buyer sees a capable product. The end user gets the full product, which is a different experience entirely.
Why B2B product teams end up building for the buyer
The incentive system in most B2B organisations points firmly toward the buyer and away from the user. Understanding why helps explain how to change it.
Sales is the loudest voice in the room. Sales teams communicate client requests, often perceived as a guarantee of winning or losing a deal, so product managers are trained to thoroughly vet each request. The feature that might close a specific enterprise deal gets escalated urgently. The usability improvement that would make the product genuinely better for the fifty thousand people already using it does not have a sales champion. It sits in the backlog.
The renewal conversation focuses on the wrong level. Typically, when the customer success team reviews an account before renewal, they are engaging with an account manager or senior stakeholder, rather than the end users who are silently struggling with the product daily. The renewal decision gets made by the buyer, not the user. Which means, again, the buyer’s priorities are what get heard.
Discovery access is structurally limited. Getting direct access to end-users in B2B can be a real struggle. In B2B, the users are typically obscured by multiple layers of organizational hierarchy. There is a buffer between the PM and the actual user of the product, which is likely to be a customer success, an account manager, product operations, or a user researcher. In some organisations, getting thirty minutes with a real end user requires weeks of coordination and approvals. The buyer, by contrast, is accessible. They are the person the sales team has been talking to for six months.
The result is a product organisation that has deep intelligence about what buyers want and shallow intelligence about what users need. Over time, the product reflects this asymmetry.
The adoption failure that everyone sees and nobody names
The downstream consequence of building for the buyer without adequately understanding the user shows up clearly and consistently. It shows up in adoption metrics that disappoint. In support queues full of questions about basic functionality. In licence waste, where an enterprise pays for five hundred seats and two hundred of them are barely active. In onboarding experiences that were designed to impress the procurement team and confuse the new employee.
The biggest UX failures happen during onboarding, where buyer expectations meet end-user reality. Usability debt compounds over time, creating operational drag through support tickets, licence waste, and longer sales cycles.
The sales cycle gets longer, too, which is counterintuitive until you understand the mechanism. When a product has a reputation for poor end-user adoption, the buyer knows it. They have heard from peers. They have read the reviews on G2. They want more assurances, more implementation support, more proof that this time will be different. The sales conversation that should take three months takes six. The deal that should close in Q2 closes in Q4, or does not close at all.
It is not uncommon to have nine to twelve-month sales cycles for complex enterprise software products. A meaningful portion of that length is caused by buyer scepticism that traces back to product quality and adoption history.
What solving this actually looks like
The product teams that navigate the divided constituency problem well share a few characteristics that are worth examining.
They maintain two distinct discovery programmes, one for buyers and one for users, and they treat the insights from each as genuinely different inputs into different decisions. Buyer discovery informs positioning, pricing, the contract structure and the features that need to be on the procurement checklist. User discovery informs the actual product experience, the workflow design, the onboarding flow and the features that determine whether the product becomes a habit or a burden.
They build relationships with internal champions at the user level, not just at the buyer level. One of the most underrated practices in B2B product management is building relationships with internal champions that can help with adoption within, and can help bridge the gap between users and buyers, typically people who are not in the bottom layers of the organization. These are the folks who can tell you what’s really working in the field, what the end user is saying on Slack after all-hands about the new tool, and what workflows the product is changing and not improving.
They treat adoption as a product metric, not an implementation metric. When low adoption is classified as a customer success or implementation problem, the product team is insulated from the feedback signal it needs most. When adoption data flows directly into product prioritisation, the gap between buyer experience and user experience becomes visible in the numbers rather than buried in anecdote.
Involving end users earlier through experience-first procurement and validation reduces first-year adoption failure. Pioneering procurement teams now ask vendors to let their actual end users try the product without vendor guidance on realistic tasks. Product teams that proactively offer this, rather than waiting to be asked, are demonstrating something unusual in the B2B market: they are confident that what they have built holds up when real people use it without a sales engineer guiding them through the happy path.
The competitive advantage hiding in plain sight
Most B2B product teams are optimising for the same thing: winning the procurement evaluation. They are competing on feature checklists, security certifications, integration depth and pricing. These are table stakes. They get you into the evaluation. They do not determine whether the product becomes genuinely embedded in how a company works.
The product teams that win in the long run are the ones that understand both constituencies deeply and build for both with discipline. They know exactly what the CFO needs to see to justify the spend. They also know exactly what the analyst needs to feel to open the product willingly every morning rather than grudgingly. And they treat these as equally important design problems with genuinely different solutions.
Aligning buyer needs with user experience is not a trade-off. It is a competitive advantage that improves retention and ROI.
The B2B products that dominate their categories, the ones that become so embedded in daily workflows that switching is genuinely painful, are not the ones that won the most procurement evaluations. They are the ones that the end users did not want to give up. That is the constituency most B2B product teams have been underserving. And it is the one where the real competitive differentiation lives.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the divided constituency problem in B2B product management?
The divided constituency problem happens when the buyer and the daily user of the product are different people with different priorities. Buyers focus on ROI, security, and compliance, while users care about usability and workflow fit.
2. Why is B2B UX design often poor?
B2B UX often suffers because procurement teams evaluate products based on features, integrations, and compliance instead of daily usability. The people using the product are usually not involved in the buying decision.
3. How does low-end user adoption affect B2B product companies?
Low adoption increases licence waste, support costs, and renewal risk. It also damages product reputation and makes future sales cycles longer and harder.
4. How many stakeholders are involved in a typical B2B purchase decision in 2026?
Modern B2B purchases involve large buying groups with stakeholders from IT, finance, operations, leadership, and end-user teams. Each group evaluates the product differently.
5. What is the difference between building for the buyer versus building for the user in B2B?
Building for the buyer focuses on winning procurement and enterprise approval. Building for the user focuses on usability, workflow adoption, and long-term product engagement. Strong B2B products balance both.
