Every medium to large scale organisation today uses a plethora of 3rd party products, sometimes covering the same use case.
Each of these products may have a different set of primary and secondary users. For example, Github would have Developers and QA, Jira would have Project managers and Developers, Google Analytics would have Data analysts and Product Managers, Tableau would have Business Analysts and Executives.
With most good organisations following a data driven culture, it becomes imperative to track data generated by the various systems. Points to be noted here:
Not every data point is important to everyone, which is why aggregation and abstraction basis the end consumer is important
As you move up the chain, data needs to be aggregated from various systems to provide holistic insights. You cannot expect the executives to go to individual systems! So “all important insights on a single screen” becomes the mantra
With this context in mind, as a developer of a B2B product, what kind of data visualisation capability should you build in your product?
Only provide OOTB visualisations
Ability to create visualisation
OOTB content + ability to create visualisation
OOTB visualisation + ability to create visualisation + API for consumption by 3rd party
OOTB visualisation + API for consumption by 3rd party
API for consumption by 3rd party
In line with lean development methodologies, you would start with 1, and move to 3 depending on you core value propositions. 2 would generally be skipped unless creating visualisations is a core value offering.
You may eventually reach 4 based on the maturity and kind of product. At this stage you are building capabilities more than solving customer problems. B2B customers make purchase decisions on these ‘extra’ capabilities. Though these ‘extras’ are seldom used. Now, 5 and 6 are interestingYou would go with 6 if you are an API first or API only product.
I believe 5 can be a sweet spot. Unless you are building a dashboard/reporting tool, the data and the associated visualisations being presented by most products is a finite state problem. Plus it is not the core value as previously discussed.
So, why add the ability to create? Provide a curated list of OOTB content, and invest on core value offerings.
The other positive aspect of this approach is API for 3rd party consumption. We know that executives prefer data presented on a single screen. So providing the right set of integrations via the APIs has higher ROI, rather than building visualisation capabilities into the product.
All said, B2B customers buy on capabilities. So unless you have other sources of stickiness - value offerings, brand, team, partnerships or anything else, you might end up with certain creation capabilities. Just don’t overdo it! Outsource non-core value add capabilities as much as possible.