0-to-1 in an enterprise, when the buyer isn't the user
Building a new product inside a large organization means designing for two audiences at once — the person who adopts it and the person who approves it. Ignore either and you stall.
Consumer 0-to-1 has a clean loop: build something people want, they use it, you grow. Enterprise 0-to-1 — especially internal AI tooling — splits that loop in two. The person who uses your product is rarely the person who approves it, and the two care about completely different things.
Two products, one build
The user wants the thing to make their day faster and their judgment sharper. The buyer wants risk reduced, spend justified, and a story they can tell upward. A great internal product has to win both, and the features that win one often look invisible to the other.
The adoption trap
The most common failure isn't a bad product — it's a product that gets approved and never adopted, or adopted by a few and never sponsored. Land-and-expand applies inside your own org: you need a beachhead of real users and a sponsor who'll fund the expansion.
Distribution beats novelty
The unglamorous truth: the best-adopted internal tool is usually not the most novel one. It's the one that met people inside a workflow they already had.
More on this soon — this one's still cooking.