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Moving upmarket as a product manager: What changes and what stays the same?

As Intercom grows, we’re moving into new markets and serving new customers. For product managers, this means evolving to build for upmarket companies while ensuring Intercom’s long-standing customers remain at the center of what we do.

Product management varies depending on your industry, company stage, company leadership, or teammates. But one thing is consistent across every product management role – a deep focus on the customer.

In recent years we have increasingly focused on upmarket, enterprise-scale customers. This is a natural evolution for many SaaS tools as they move towards a healthier economic model, as captured in Christoph Janz’s seminal 2014 blog.

The challenge for product managers is ensuring that your product evolves to meet the needs of your new customers without leaving long-term, smaller customers behind. Here are three beliefs we’ve followed at Intercom as we’ve begun to broaden the range of companies we work with.

1. Customer behavior is more important than company size

At Intercom, we obsess about our customers’ success. We solve customer problems by deeply understanding the jobs that they use our product to tackle, often applying the jobs to be done framework.

When we view bigger customers through this lens, we don’t focus on their employee count, revenue, or market capitalization. What really matters is understanding customer behaviors. We spend time studying the challenges they face each day, the opportunities our product can unlock for them, and how they might use Intercom to solve problems.

Haystack transforms the way organizations communicate, collaborate, and share knowledge. Engage employees around a common purpose and create smarter, better-connected workforces around the world.

This approach was crucial to designing our Articles product. There are lots of features that content authors and support managers need to see in their knowledge base product – and as companies grow in size, that list of required features grows too. Instead of considering company size when prioritizing the problems to be solved, we classified based on maturity of a customer’s knowledge base using three labels: early, established, or advanced.

Early customers have smaller content libraries (less than 100 articles), fewer authors, and uni-layered, mono-lingual content structures. Established customers have more content (100+ articles), between three and five content authors, and more complex content structures. Content performance and return on investment is likely to be measured more closely.

Labor prices vary based on geography, but the number of man-days for a project should be more or less the same.

2. Small List

• regular updating and testing our security technology;
• implementing technology of highest security standards;
• ensuring that our partners are GDPR compliant;