Every start-up faces the challenges of managing its product road map and meeting customer's business needs at the same time. Managing these product and customer needs results in conflicting priorities. This challenge is even bigger for start-ups in the enterprise software space because there are lots of product gaps, customer's business is unique, implementations are long drawn, deal size is big, there are fewer deals and the start-up is facing competition for large established companies.

Product marketing and management now has to create a balance between building the right features and functions for the base product and at the same time build them in a way that helps the organization grow its customer base and hence its revenue. If the features and functions are built randomly per customer's need then the company ends up with a product that cannot be used by other customers. On the other hand if the product is built to support generic business flows, then this leads to longer implementation times and too many customizations.

This presentation covers some key product management and marketing practices that allow companies to create harmony in managing product road map and customer's business needs in an enterprise software space.