In this 5‑minute video, Ibrahim Bashir clarifies what a B2B product is and how it differs from SaaS and product‑led growth (PLG). He introduces a three‑layer model that captures the distinct personas involved in any B2B offering: the buying business (enterprise, SMB, mid‑market), the employee users within that business, and the end consumers who ultimately benefit from the business’s product. Using his experience at Amplitude building analytics for Instacart, he shows how value flows through these layers and how each persona has its own value proposition and time horizon. The business cares about revenue growth, retention, and margins over quarters or years; employees care about productivity, change‑management costs, and toolchain integration over weeks to months; consumers care about frictionless experiences and engagement in real‑time. Bashir concludes with practical advice for B2B product builders: consider organizational maturity, change‑management overhead, employee workflow, and consumer impact when designing and positioning the product.
Chapters
Hey folks, I'm back with another 5 Minute Friday, and today I actually wanted to talk about the different dimensions that occur inside a B2B product. And because it's not as straightforward as a lot of people think. In fact, I have a lot of readers and viewers who tend to come from consumer product backgrounds or non-product backgrounds, and I think the nuance of the different personas in a B2B product kind of gets lost. So I wanted to just spend a couple of minutes explaining But before I jump into it, I also wanted to share, I tend to use the term B2B products, and I know other people will interchangeably use SaaS or enterprise products. To me, those are fundamentally different things. So a B2B product, just to spell it out, is a business building a product for another business, another organization. Now, it could be an organization of just one person who does some sort of professional work. It could be an organization that's very small, which people call SMB. Could be medium-sized, which people call mid-market, or it could be a very, very large organization. And that's what people mean when they say enterprise is the segment of B2B products that you're building. SaaS is a deployment model. It is sort of putting things in the cloud. It is about a delivery and deployment method that you utilize as opposed to desktop software or mobile software. And so again, people use SaaS interchangeably, but they're is nothing stopping you from building a software as a service for a consumer-oriented use case as well. And then the other term that I hear a lot is PLG. PLG is just product-led growth, which is letting the product speak for itself. So the demo, the docs, etc., kind of invite the user in and make it easier and straightforward to do the job versus putting the onus on the user. So PLG is just good product development practices, especially in the 2020s. But that doesn't necessarily imply B2B. So that's my definition of B2B. And so the— and I've included a diagram with this video, which hopefully illustrates, I think there's 3 layers with the B2B product. There is the business itself that you're selling into. There is the employee at the business who is doing some of the work required. And then there is the end consumer that that business is building for. So even in a B2B product, there is ultimately a consumer. So you can think of most B2B products as B2B2C. I'm using all letters of the alphabet at this point. And so just to give you a very specific example, when I used to work at Amplitude, we built digital analytics software that would help you visualize a customer journey through your application. So let's say an example customer was Instacart. Instacart is using Amplitude to understand the user journey, how people are ordering or not ordering, where they fall off. So we are selling to Instacart as an enterprise, right? That is the business. Ultimately, the product managers at Instacart, the data scientists at Instacart are the actual users. So those are the employees. But then the end consumer, the people making orders from Instacart, the people adding things to cart, those are the consumers. And in a way, you can think of a B2B product as serving each of those constituents with a slightly different value proposition. Because the business buys, The employee base buys in, and then the consumer that is sort of the end receiver of the value actually buys secondhand without even realizing all the infrastructure and tooling that goes into the product that they're using. And so the thing I wanted to highlight here is when you're building B2B products, you have to keep all 3 of these personas and dimensions in mind because they care about different things, right? And they care about them on different horizons. So the business cares about, are we growing revenue? Are we retaining revenue? Do we have healthy margins? You know, I've posted about this at Lanta before, but a business really just cares about revenue creation, revenue preservation, and revenue margins. But the employee base who is using the tool, maybe by choice, maybe by force, has to think about productivity, change management, overhead, integration with the rest of the toolchain. So they have a slightly different perspective. And the end consumer, they also care about it. If you implement Amplitude in your Instacart app and it adds latency to the checkout page, the consumer cares about it. Now, they might not be aware of the source of it, but you have to keep that in mind as a builder of the B2B product, that there is a value proposition that you have to get across at every level of those dimensions. And then the time horizon matters a lot as well. So a business investing in a B2B product, they probably want to see results in quarters, maybe even years. But if I'm an employee, I want to see changes in weeks and months. And if I'm a consumer, I'm going to notice things with every app update, even if It's like a minute of my time, right? And so I would say the thing to keep in mind is when you're building these products for a business, you have to think about the organizational maturity, the change management costs. For the employee that you're building for, you have to think about their productivity, their workflow, their toolchain, and how you might meet them where you are. And from the end consumer point of view, you care about engagement and adoption and not introducing workflow into their core job to be done. So hopefully that was a good 101 lesson into the different dimensions of B2B products, and I'll be back soon with another 5 Minute Friday. Thank you.
