A bit of insight into the complexities of designing enterprise software—I'm a product designer who's been fortunate enough to work on a fast growing product. When I joined our average number of seats was probably about 20. I'd imagine it's now 10x that.
As the post mentions the buyer is not always the end-user and in the enterprise space features are often prioritized for the buyer. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but enterprise product teams should watch out for buyer-focused features that deteriorate the end-user's experience. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to avoid that.
There is also a trade-off between simplicity and flexibility. It is often impossible to do both and larger customers will always want flexibility.
Designing for multi-level hierarchies within organizations is also exceptionally difficult—visibility, access controls, permissions, groups, group hierarchies—these have all been the most difficult features I've ever worked on.
I have immense respect for the product teams at Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP and the other enterprise software companies. The stuff is not easy.
As the post mentions the buyer is not always the end-user and in the enterprise space features are often prioritized for the buyer. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but enterprise product teams should watch out for buyer-focused features that deteriorate the end-user's experience. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to avoid that.
There is also a trade-off between simplicity and flexibility. It is often impossible to do both and larger customers will always want flexibility.
Designing for multi-level hierarchies within organizations is also exceptionally difficult—visibility, access controls, permissions, groups, group hierarchies—these have all been the most difficult features I've ever worked on.
I have immense respect for the product teams at Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP and the other enterprise software companies. The stuff is not easy.