Key Activities

SaaS brings an additional layer of considerations that need to be factored into your overall strategy. There are a handful of activities that are essential to developing a robust product strategy. The goal here is to highlight these specific areas and ensure that your company is looking at all the elements that need to be included in your SaaS product offering. It is important to note that your strategy is not just about your customer’s experience with the product, it’s also about their experience with your service. This means your strategy must also consider how it embraces the agility, innovation and efficiency that is traditionally associated with SaaS environments.

Below is a list of the specific activities that companies often include in their product strategy and roadmap development:

Developing user and buyer personas

• Goal: Develop profiles of the different types of users and buyers that will be using your system with an emphasis on identifying the natural boundaries (functional, performance, isolation, etc.) that represent increasing levels of value to your customers.

• Outcome: A clearly defined set of user and buyer personas that captures the attributes and experience that are unique to each persona. The goal here is to think beyond your current customers and consider how different tenant profiles might attach different expectations and values to your product.

• Key Decision Point: Are there tiers of tenants in your environment that would be offered different experiences for different personas, and what attributes would most distinguish these tenants?

Collecting Customer Data

• Goal: Collect data from target customers to get better insights into their product and service requirements.

• Outcome: A collection of data points that can be used to validate and refine your strategy. The goal here is to not rely purely on instinct or legacy insights, and focus on directly engaging your customers to assess their view, interests and expectations for a SaaS offering in your domain.

• Key Decision Point: How much data will you need and how will you collect this data from your customers? Which types of data will best guide your decision-making process?

Defining Onboarding Experience

• Goal: Determine how customers will acquire and adopt your SaaS product, with specific emphasis on determining how you can introduce new tenants in a frictionless model that promotes repeatability and growth.

• Outcome: A mapping of the onboarding experience that identifies the business, operational, system, and accounting constructs that must be configured and launched to introduce a new tenant into your system. Determine if this mechanism will be engaged directly by customers and/or some internally triggered process.

• Key Decision Point: What is customers expectation from the onboarding experience? How will the company need to change to accommodate these new registration processes? How will you manage and assess time-to-value for new customers?

Profiling Security, Compliance, Geographic and Data Protection Requirements

• Goal: Capture any compliance, security, geographic, or domain constraints that must be met when delivering your system in a multi-tenant model.

• Outcome: A profile of the security, geographic and compliance considerations that are mapped to the different personas of your system. You need to know what these requirements are, but how they might vary from one type of customer to the other. Determine how these considerations might influence the way you build, operate, and sell your product.

• Key Decision Point: Are there data and/or resources in your SaaS solution that will impact how you approach the multi-tenant aspects of your solution? Will this solution require deployment to multiple geographies and, if so, are these near-term or long-term requirements? Do you need to offer specific packaging of your solution to personas that will be less receptive to multi-tenant infrastructure?

Defining Agility Goals

• Goal: Outline in detail the agility goals you are targeting and measuring for the SaaS offering.

• Outcome: A clear description of the tenets and metrics that your company will be targeting as it builds out the operational, company, and business footprint of your SaaS environment. Define specific metrics that will assess cycle time, up time, and a host of other well-defined metrics that are used to assess SaaS agility.

• Key Decision Point: How willing is the company to value agility from the outset of your journey? What expectations do you have about how these metrics will be woven into the culture of the team?

Portfolio Management

• Goal: Evaluate performance, identify risks and opportunities, prioritize high-value products.

• Outcome: Optimize resource allocation across your product portfolio and align the product mix with your business strategy.

• Key Decision Point: Should the new SaaS solution be prioritized, what resources should be allocated for this effort?