Guiding Questions

As you are building out your product strategy, there are some common areas that companies will often explore as they attempt to fill in the details of their overall approach. These topics will vary widely based on the nature of your product, where you are starting your SaaS journey, and what customer experience you are targeting. The goal in this section is to provide a set of topics that will help outline concepts to develop a more complete view of your overall product strategy.

Developing user and buyer personas

• What key attributes would distinguish the different types of customers that would use your product?

• What is the range of market segments (entry level, mid-tier, enterprise) are you targeting with this offering?

• How do the needs and expectations of each of these customer profiles change based on their segment?

• Is the user persona different than the buyer persona?

• Are there personas that you would consider out of scope of this offering?

• Are there ways that you will need differentiate the personas from personas that are currently being targeted by other offerings in your portfolio?

Collecting Customer Data

• How can you identify and reach customers you may not engage today?

• What are the key areas you want to target for collecting data? Have you considered conducting a survey?

• Are there specific SaaS questions you may want to ask (onboarding, pricing, etc.)?

• How can you capture security, isolation, and multi-tenant readiness of this market?

• How many customers will represent a reasonable sample size?

• What mechanism can you use to gather input from your potential customers?

Defining Onboarding Experience

• How will customers sign up for your service?

• How frequently do you expect new customers to be onboarding to your system?

• Will you support a self-service onboarding process?

• Will you collect billing information (credit card) during your registration process?

• Will your system use an internally managed process to register new tenants?

• For an internal process, what internal mechanisms will need to be automated to reduce friction in your onboarding process?

• What measure will you take to ensure that registration is a fully repeatable process?

• Will you support a demo mode for your product that enables customer to run a trial experience?

• Will you seed the environment with sample data or experiences to streamline a customer’s time to value?

• How will you capture metrics and data that will enable you to assess the efficiency of your onboarding flow?

Profiling Security, Compliance, Geographic and Data Protection Requirements

• Do your customers have specific compliance, geographic, or regulatory requirements that will influence the profile of your SaaS application?

• Are the regulatory and compliance requirements constrained specific areas of your application/data, or is this a global requirement?

• What is motivating your need for geographic reach (market segments, performance, compliance, availability, etc.)?

• How are your potential competitors addressing these requirements, and how will your strategy match or differ from the existing approaches?

• How will addressing these requirements effect the cost and operational efficiency of your offering?

• Do these requirements vary by geographic location or market segment?

• Can you offer more dedicated standalone solutions to customers that are less willing to operate in a shared infrastructure model?

• Has your company outlined a specific General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) policy that defines your general requirements and approach to addressing the compliance requirements of GDPR?

• How will onboarding be supported if you plan a multi-geography model?

• What measures will you take to ensure that the agility and operational efficiency will not be impacted by supporting a multi-geography model?

• How will you factor geographic cost variations into your business model?

• Do you need to factor these considerations into your initial release or can this come at some point later in your product lifecycle?

• What is the profile of your data and are there specific types of data that will require a greater level of isolation?

Defining Agility Goals

• Are there specific agility goals you have identified and are targeting for your SaaS business?

• How will your company target the reduction of development cycle times, reducing the time from feature inception to release?

• What metrics and tooling will you put in place to bring broad visibility and measurability to your agility goals?

• Which structural and cultural changes will be needed in your company to promote and prioritize agility?

• How will your product management team begin to land and emphasize agility in your product backlog?

• Will you set specific goals for agility that span the entire company?

Developing a Packaging / Pricing Profile

• What are the common mechanisms that are used to monetize solutions in your domain/market?

• Will your domain/market support a subscription-based billing model, and if so, what unit(s) of consumption best correlate to value for your target customers?

• Will you use features as a way to distinguish different tiers of your offering?

• Will you limit performance or resource consumption for different tiers?

• What data can you use to determine identify the boundaries that will be most effective at distinguishing tiers and promoting advancement to new tiers that is compelling to users?

• Will you need to support a separate tier for high-value tenants that impose unique demands on your solution (a standalone deployment)?

• Is there some mix of long-term and subscription billing that might better map to the needs of your customers?

Portfolio Management

• What are the risks and opportunities of the new SaaS solutions and the other products your company sells?

• How can you evaluate the performance of each product?

• Which high-value products should be prioritized?

• How resources should be allocated across the portfolio?