Unlike simple B2C tests, B2B experiments require tight coordination with sales, customer success, and even legal. This alignment is crucial to manage customer expectations, contractual obligations, and prevent confusion for client-facing teams.

While industry experience provides context, true 'product sense'—the intuition for what might go wrong or what questions to ask—is primarily developed through strong product management discipline. It’s about knowing how to serve a user, a skill that is transferable across industries.

An industry veteran without product discipline may build what worked years ago, ignoring current market dynamics. A skilled product manager, though new to the industry, will use discovery to find today's optimal solution, avoiding costly failures based on outdated assumptions.

Less mature companies over-index on industry experience, believing it shortcuts customer discovery. More mature organizations prioritize strong product discipline, knowing a skilled PM can learn any industry but a subject matter expert often struggles to learn the product craft.

Reframe your market from B2B or B2C to B2H (Business to Human). This change in perspective emphasizes that whether in consumer or enterprise settings, the end-user is a person with emotional needs. This mindset makes "product delight" relevant and essential for all products, not just consumer apps.

Being great at product for one SaaS doesn't guarantee success at another. Product sense is highly context-specific, developed by training your 'internal LLM' on a particular set of customers and use cases. When moving to a new product or market, even experienced product leaders must go through a significant learning curve to rebuild this intuition from scratch.

In specialized domains like payroll, users may understand process steps but not the underlying rules. For experienced product leaders, customer interviews are less for problem discovery (which requires domain expertise) and more for validating the usability of a proposed solution.

A key benefit of industry experience is a pre-existing network of clients, partners, and vendors. This allows a product manager to quickly validate ideas and conduct discovery by making a few phone calls, a process that could take months for an outsider starting from scratch.

To truly understand B2B customer pain points, data and interviews are insufficient. Product teams must immerse themselves in the customer's environment, such as by working for an advertiser for a week or shadowing an accountant for a day, to gain firsthand workflow experience and develop deep empathy.