You’re a service, not a product

Adopting a “service” model is more than just marketing or terminology. In a service mindset, you will find yourself moving away from aspects of the traditional product-based approach to development. While features and functionality are certainly important to every product, SaaS places more emphasis on the experience customers will have with your service.

What does this mean? In a service-centric model, you think more about how customers are onboarded to your service, how quickly they achieve value, and how rapidly you can introduce features that address customer needs. Details associated with how your service is built, operated, and managed are out of your customer’s view.

In this mode, we think about this SaaS service as we would with any other service we might consume. If we’re in a restaurant, we certainly care about the food, but we also care about the service. How quickly does your server come to your table, how often do they refill your water, how fast does the food come—these are all measures of the service experience. This is the same mindset and value system that should shape how we think about building a SaaS service.

This as-a-service model should have a heavy influence on how you build your teams and your service. Your backlog of work will now put these experience attributes on equal or higher footing than features and functions. The business will also view these as foundational to the long-term growth and success of your SaaS offering.