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B2B product discovery has a particular villain: the enterprise customer who pays a lot, asks for a lot, and whose requests land directly in your backlog via the sales team 😅 Sound familiar? It’s what Melissa Perri calls the build trap - and in B2B, it’s everywhere. When one customer represents 20% of your revenue, saying no to their feature request feels existential. So you say yes. And then you say yes again. And before long you have a product that does 47 things adequately and nothing brilliantly. Escaping The Build Trap is essential reading if you’re working in B2B. The core argument: companies fall into the build trap when they measure success by output (features shipped) instead of outcomes (problems solved). Discovery is how you get out.

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What makes B2B discovery different

In B2C, your users and buyers are the same person. In B2B, they almost never are. The person who signs the contract (economic buyer) is rarely the person who uses the product daily (end user) - and they have completely different definitions of value. The economic buyer wants ROI, compliance, integration with existing tools, and something they can sell internally. The end user wants something that doesn’t make their job harder. These goals overlap more than you’d think - but you need to discover both, separately. Miss the economic buyer and you don’t get the deal. Miss the end user and you get churn 12 months later.

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The sales-product tension

The most politically charged part of B2B discovery is the relationship with sales. Sales hears customer problems all day. They’re a goldmine of signal - but only if you know how to extract it. The problem is that sales naturally translates customer problems into feature requests before they reach you. “The customer said they need a bulk export” is a solution. What you need is “the customer is spending 3 hours a week manually copying data between systems.” That’s a problem - and it might have five better solutions than bulk export. Perri’s advice: get PMs into customer conversations alongside sales, not downstream of them. Hear the problem in the customer’s words, not filtered through a commercial lens.

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Who to talk to (and how)

In B2B you need at least three types of conversations: Economic buyers - Focus on business outcomes, pain points at the organisational level, and what success looks like for them. These are strategic conversations, not feature discussions. End users - Run these like any good discovery interview (see The Mom Test). Focus on their daily workflow, their workarounds, where things break down. Champions - The internal advocate who wants your product to succeed. They’ll tell you things the economic buyer won’t. Treat them as partners, not just sources of information.

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The biggest B2B discovery trap

Building for your loudest, largest customer instead of for the market. One big customer’s requirements can look like product strategy if you’re not careful. Perri is clear on this: individual customer requests are data points, not direction. Your job is to find the pattern across customers - the underlying need that multiple companies share - and build for that. Lesson learned: in B2B, the most dangerous words in product are “our biggest customer asked for this.” Sometimes it’s the right call. Usually it’s the build trap wearing a revenue number as a disguise 🪤