Product Agility

Preyash Shah: Designing Products for a Few: Navigating Enterprise Constraints & Customisation - Productized 2025 TalkInTen

• Ben Maynard, Ryan Lane, Preyash Shah

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-Product Agility Podcast — Live from Productized Lisbon

We’re recording from the brilliant Productized conference in Lisbon — a must-attend for product leaders, designers and builders. Productized consistently delivers thoughtful programming, real-world case studies and a welcoming community. We’re honoured to partner with Productized for the third year running and grateful to Bobcats Coding for making this Lisbon series possible.

In this short Talk in Ten episode, we speak with Preyash, a product manager building enterprise software for the biopharma sector. He explains what it’s like designing for a small number of high-stakes customers and how that changes prioritisation, product design and customer relationships.

Key topics discussed

  • Differences between enterprise and broader B2B product constraints
  • When customisation beats standardisation - and how to make custom work reusable
  • Prioritisation when a handful of customers drive ARR
  • Balancing product thinking with advisory and negotiation skills
  • Designing configurable surfaces without becoming a services org


Guest bio:

Preyash is a product manager working for a tech company in France, focused on the biopharma industry. Over six years across two product suites, he’s specialised in building enterprise solutions where a small number of customers carry significant revenue and require high configurability.


Thanks to our sponsor: Bobcats Coding — a Budapest-based digital product studio specialising in AI engineering and end-to-end product development. Check out their free AI economics guidebook at bobcatscoding.com.

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast where we explore the ever changing world of product leadership and org design, helping you navigate complexity and build better outcomes for your people and your customers. This week we're coming to you live from Lisbon for the third year in a row at the Productize conference where I'm grabbing 10 minute conversations with product thinkers, leaders and innovators from around the world. These quick fire chats are all about what's shaping our industry right now, from AI and product strategy to the human side of building great products. Now a huge thank you goes out to Bobcatz Coding for making this Lisbon series possible. Bobcats is a Budapest and Lisbon based digital product studio specializing in AI engineering and end to end digital product development. They're also on a mission to educate the market, exploring a new topic every six months and this fall is no exception. Their latest AI economics guidebook is out now and you can download it for free@bobcatscoding.com now here's your talking 10 we have Prayesh Shah. I don't know why I always look. Down at my piece of paper to read the name. I know the name, but it's like a habit. Now say hey. Hello Presh. Hey. We're joined by Ryan, CTO of Bobcat's Coding. Hello, Ryan. Hi, nice to be here with you. Hi Ryan. Ryan's the best co host because he asks great questions and he's got a fantastic voice. So I'm looking forward to hearing what we have to say on this talk in 10. So we've only got a short amount of time for anyone that hasn't heard these types of episodes before, but just trying to get a nice clear overview of the impact and the story behind some of the amazing talks and workshops that are happening here at productised 2025. Hey Presh, would you mind telling our listeners a little bit about who you. Are and what it is you're doing at Productized? Hi, my name is Presh. I am a product manager working for a tech company in France catering to specifically to biopharma industry. And most of the customers of the company that I worked for are enterprise customers. Right? So the business is like very sensitive to them. And the reason why I'm here today is basically to share my experience of working on enterprise products over the past three years and try to give like a different perspective because when I was like preparing or when I was like, you know, trying to get better in my career, a lot of the frameworks and the playbooks, they were mostly centered towards like B2B but with some, with like around thousand customers. Right. But then when you are working in a setting like mine where there are just like hundred customers, a lot of them are like very sensitive in terms of like how and their requests. And that sensitivity is also reflected in our, you know, in our revenue aspects. So how do you, in a situation like this, like how do you build products, how do you work with them, how do you manage the communication and everything? So all the learnings that I've had since last three, three years, I just wanted to share. It's really interesting. I'll give you this in a second. Right. All I want to say was I was just talking to Tammy Rees and we were saying how there is a big difference between like tiny little like startups who haven't got any investment in figuring it out and then your huge behemoth organizations. Actually some really interesting organizations in the middle and I think there's different stories in each. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to hearing a bit more about it. But sorry Ron, what do you want to say? No problem. I was just curious if you could tell us what are the real fundamental differences between building products for enterprise? If we have to break it down. To the most simple distinction, I think so there's obviously the part which is around the compliance and you know, you need to have the right data privacy and the security and everything, which is always like a big part of working with enterprise customers. But keeping those aside, like just building products for them, this is more around working in with different requirements. Right. So every big enterprise, they have their own processes, right? So if you are working in a system or like in a very niche market, everyone would have their own processes. And then you can't build like a single product that will cater to all of them because everybody works differently. And it's also very difficult to ask them to change the way they work because they are like probably hundreds of users. And then asking them to do that change management that they have already invested in is also very different. So how do you build a product where everybody has a different way of working but at the same time you don't want to build like 10 different products for different customers. Right. So the way you prioritize is different. Like the features that you build, they are more leaning towards configurability than having consistency. The experiences are very different. The requests or the priorities from one customer is different than for the other customer. And there's always this, the revenue or their ARR in check. So what do you say to a million dollar Customer requesting something which is like very critical to their process and how do you manage that? Communication with them versus somebody else. So there's always the balancing act that you need to do that. Okay. Even though you are a big customer, how can I still make sure that I prioritize your work or somebody else's work over each other people? Yeah, it sounds like you're operating within a set of constraints with this. Would you say that these are additional constraints or just different constraints? I think these are certainly constraints which are different. I don't think they are additional. I think if we draw a parallel with like another B2B SaaS company which is, you know, which has say around thousand customers, the risk of losing one customer is not as much on your balance sheet. Right. Whereas, you know, if you're working where you know, like 70% of your revenue is coming from the enterprise customers, like just one customer leaving will have like, you know, double digit or single digit impact on your balance sheet. So I think how you deal with them, it's different. There's also a lot of, in addition to having the products skills, there's also a part where you need to do consulting with them. Right. You also need to advise them as to how they should improve their process by learning from the other people. And many times you should also, like, there's also the element of negotiations. Right. Because when you are an enterprise customers, they come with the idea that, okay, you know, we are someone who's bringing this much of revenue and this much of ticket size, so we want you to listen to us, but then that's not always possible. Right. So it's also about negotiating with them in terms of, okay, how do we prioritize? Is this something that you really need? And there's also some brutality around the prioritization exercise. I think those elements make it very different than, you know, having another B2B SaaS space. Yeah. So one thing that product owners often warn against is jumping at every single individual request for a customer. But it sounds like that this is sort of the name of the game when you're, or at least to some degree, you have to cater more towards these customizing requests. Would you say that you have particular processes for managing this level of configuration as opposed to standardizing a product experience? Can you talk about that? No, I think. Thanks for that question. I think it's very important to point out that the idea is still not that you work as a service provider for them. Right. Like, okay, I need to build a product just for you and then for your Use case. But we would still need to have elements that are like very specialized for that customer. Now the challenge is that, okay, how it's also a product and a design challenge as to how you make that custom, like that feature that you are building for one customer be useful to the other ones. And if it means that okay, few of them has to tweak their ways of working, then you also need to work with them to advise them that okay, maybe this is the better way of doing this in order to achieve this as well. So it's also about like being a bit of like an expert in that domain and you know like what you learn from one customer and like share it with the other one. Try to like have some uniformity. There will never be like one single process of you know, let's say for example how sales happens today. It's like the process is like fairly common and straightforward. But then now in, in cases like this, like that's not really true. Right. So you can't have like consistency across every processes but then you still need to work for like specialization in, in. Some of the cases it sounds pretty complicated. I think before your experience in this size enterprise, have you got experience in smaller companies and you're able to compare and contrast? Unfortunately no. So I've spent close to six years in product and across two companies and across two product suites and both of them were heavily catered to building enterprise customers. Building for enterprise customers. And I think that has been also my pain point per se as to like how do I the knowledge that's out there in the world related to product management, how much of that is applicable in my context, right in my constraints. And so it's more about like okay, how can I build based on what I know with taking bits and pieces from everywhere and how can we build for like a product. Product for the enterprise customers. Amazing. I think there's so much good advice and insight there for people that I'm sure in very similar situations to you. I know a lot of people listen, probably are good, it resonates with them. So thank you so much for taking the time to come and share these insights with us. And when is your talk happening? My talk is tomorrow at 11:11pm That's a late talk. I'm not sure who's going to be here. 11am I'll go. Really all the best for it. Yeah. And I think the people are coming along and be lucky to hear you say thank you very much for coming on And Ryan, thank you very much for coming along as well, great questions as always. Please do tune in and stay tuned because we're back again for another talking tent at some point very soon.



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Ben Maynard

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