What actually makes B2B product work different?

Four structural differences. The buyer and the user are different people with conflicting needs — the economic buyer wants reporting and control, the user wants speed, and the roadmap has to serve both. Discovery runs through a sales team's calendar, not an analytics dashboard, so a B2B PM needs to extract signal from salespeople without being captured by them. Individual deals are large enough to bend the roadmap — the core B2B skill is distinguishing "one customer's request" from "the segment speaking through one customer." And pricing is a product decision: packaging, tiers, and expansion paths are roadmap items, not a spreadsheet someone in finance owns.

What should you screen for?

• Has shipped for buyers AND users, and can articulate when they conflicted
• Has told a large customer no — and can tell you how the deal survived
• Treats the sales team as a discovery channel, with a working cadence
• Has owned or materially shaped pricing and packaging
• Can read a sales pipeline and connect it to roadmap evidence

What interview questions expose the difference?

Three that work: "Your largest customer, 20% of ARR, demands a feature that serves only them. Walk me through the actual conversation." — you're listening for segment thinking and deal empathy at the same time. "How do you run discovery when you can't watch users in the product?" — B2B-native PMs have a system; consumer PMs improvise. "Tell me about a pricing change you were part of" — the answer separates PMs who've operated in B2B from PMs who've read about it.

How does this change compensation and sourcing?

Barely on the numbers — B2B PM salaries track the general PM market ($110K–$170K US base by seniority) — but strongly on sourcing: the best B2B PMs are inside vertical SaaS companies and rarely on job boards. Source from your customers' vendor ecosystems, adjacent tools in your category, and communities where PMs discuss enterprise problems. A vertical-adjacent PM who knows your buyer's world ramps months faster than a stronger generalist.