Why Do Enterprise Products Still Pick Up the Phone?

Julie Zhuo says enterprise products still have to answer the phone in the middle of the night. Accountability runs deeper than on a free consumer app: an edge case that affects even a couple of people has to be prioritized when it is very serious for the company or the customer. The business is still a product company, not a services company, so a duct-tape fix that solves one problem without making the product better is a trade-off she has to weigh.

The goal is an enduring, sustainable product that takes on more of the work humans would otherwise do manually. A strong enterprise company productizes the jobs a team does not want to keep doing by hand, whether data pipelines, repeated analysis, or customer service that answers the same questions over and over. The problems stay real. If an enterprise customer-solution chatbot does not work, somebody still has to pick up the phone, because the software is part of the customer's integration. The duty sits at a very deep scale, unlike something built free for billions of people.