Enterprise Products Can Be Simple to Use
Enterprise Products Can Be Simple to Use
Most of my product career has been in enterprise software, at OpenText and now ServiceNow. What drives me is building products that help businesses run their processes through interfaces people find easy to use. Enterprise software has a reputation for being hard to use, but I do not think it has to be.
Complexity belongs in the system, not the screen
Business processes are complicated. Approvals, rules, exceptions and integrations all have to work. The mistake is to show all of that to every user. A good enterprise product hides the machinery and shows each person only what they need to do their part.
The buyer is not the user
In enterprise software, the person who signs the contract is often not the person who uses the product every day. It is easy to build for the buyer's checklist and forget the user's day. I try to spend as much time with the people doing the work as with the people approving the purchase.
Editors deserve the same care as end users
When I worked on Event Action Center at OpenText, a lot of the effort went into the rule editors and action plan editors, working with UX and visual design teams. The people who configure a product are users too. If configuration is painful, the product ends up set up badly, and everyone downstream feels it.
Integration is part of the experience
Enterprise products rarely stand alone. They take events and data from other systems and act on them. How smoothly that works is part of the user experience, even if no one sees a screen for it. Out of the box integrations save customers effort and reduce what can go wrong.
Releases are a rhythm, not an event
Enterprise roadmaps run across releases, and customers plan around them. Keeping a steady, predictable rhythm, and being clear about what is coming, builds trust with customers who depend on the product for their own operations.
What AI adds
Building AI products in the Curious PM cohort made me think about how much enterprise work is people reading, routing and filling in the same information again and again. AI can take much of that away, which makes simple interfaces even more achievable.
Spandana skipped presentations and built real AI products.
Spandana Kintali was part of the August 2026 cohort at Curious PM, alongside 24 other talented participants.