Where did consumerization of the enterprise go?

As software has become increasingly affordable and accessible, purchasing has been democratized down to the end user. Consumers can now buy B2B SaaS tools in much the same way that they purchase B2C mobile apps. Meanwhile, corporations are increasingly adopting consumer-like software solutions for business uses and are purchasing products that their employees already use and love.

In recent years, this trend has come to be known as product led growth (PLG). We have invested in this trend, both in companies that use a PLG sales model (Writer, Fleetsmith — now Apple) and PLG enablement tools (Endgame, Arcade) and understand how it works (and more to be announced at pre-seed/seed stage!). An employee starts using a product to improve their workflow, they share the tool with their colleagues, and the tool gets adopted by an entire organization or company. But PLG fits into a larger trend that is more than just a sales motion: the consumerization of the enterprise.

If you follow B2B SaaS, the concept of the consumerization of the enterprise is not a new topic, and you may argue old news. Well, we looked at Google trends to see when the concept first started gaining steam, and shockingly, there was not enough search history of “consumerization of the enterprise” to even display trended results anywhere between 2004–2022.

This seems counterintuitive. How is it that arguably one of the most impactful trends in enterprise software doesn’t have sufficient data to show trended results on Google? There’s not enough data to show results “bottom’s up SaaS” either. “Product led growth” and “PLG” started spiking in 2020, but this trend has been going on for far longer than 2 years. What once was an accepted concept is now defined by its subcomponents: bottoms up, product led growth, product led sales, customer obsessed, etc. These piecemeal definitions have been conflated with the broader concept of consumerization of the enterprise. Each of these components is a necessary, but not sufficient condition to describe the consumerization of the enterprise in its entirety. Words matter! A partial definition causes founders and investors alike to miss out on the entire picture of what it takes to build a consumerized enterprise, jeopardizing the product / service experience that modern consumers are clamoring for and the valuation multiples of the consumerized enterprise icons Slack, Zoom, Notion, and Airtable. It also influences the types of founders attracted to building in the space and early team hiring decisions.

Individual concepts and practices describing parts of a consumerized enterprise become conflated with encompassing all of consumerized enterprise. We need a new definition!

The left side of this chart are the hodgepodge of search terms we use to describe portions of the massive market trend. We argue that we should return to the broader term, consumerized enterprise. This may seem like semantics, but the way we define industries are calls to actions. At the most basic level, consumerization of the enterprise is the practice of borrowing principles from the best consumer businesses, and applying the same to operate your B2B business. This includes design, analytics, brand building, org models — a wide variety of disciplines and tactics beyond the skills brought to bear by FAANG software engineers alone (though we ❤️ you!).

For us at Upfront, we see the consumerization of the enterprise consisting of 7 principles (and yes, product-led growth is one of them!). Consumerized Enterprises are 1) customer obsessed 2) product-led 3) building a brand with a soul 4) focused on the right metrics 5) hiring the right people, 6) with the right org model and 7) Using the right tools. In the subsequent posts, we’ll dive into each one of the 7 principles in detail.

7 Principles of the Consumerized Enterprise (Yes, Product-Led is one of them!)

Consumerized enterprise, seen through the more expansive lens of these 7 principles, encompasses a wide set of disciplines, tactics, and (extremely important to us) people who may not have the cookie cutter resume. These diverse backgrounds will provide the perspectives critically needed to build enterprise products that will be adopted globally. Stay tuned!

Thank you to my collaborators, Ryan Chen & Spencer Calvert.