The promise of SaaS is that by paying for a subscription, customers are investing in future innovation of the product which they will get to use with no additional cost.
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Last week we covered two options for building your roadmap. Now that it’s compiled, it’s time to share it out. A roadmap is a marketing tool for your plans for the coming quarter and year, so investing time in ensuring your intents are crystal clear…
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Last week we learned how to choose the highest value strategic initiatives as you plan for 2020. Now you’re ready to create your roadmap. This is when the product leader really sets the bar for what’s communicated and how. At the very least, a leader should provide guidelines and templates for their PMs’ roadmaps.
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Now that you’ve set your vision of where you want your company / portfolio / product to be, gathered data to better understand where you are (or how far away you are from your goal), and generated ideas on how to get there, it’s time to make some tough choices.
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Keeping remote teams connected is a challenge for any distributed company, but what if EVERYONE was remote?
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It’s that time of year — the mad dash to get everything figured out for the next year. Planning, budgeting, and roadmapping season is in full force. So let’s make it our New Year’s resolution for 2020 to do product strategy right.
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First, identify key customer segments and their needs. Review the data and see where you are winning and retaining customers. Is there room for improvement?
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You’re efficiency focused. You see how to deliver value faster to customers by shortening feedback loops and sharing knowledge within the org. And assuming you’ve allocated — or are considering — a 2020 headcount for Product Operations, how do you find the right person? What are the right skills and experiences for this hire? How do you source candidates?
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Product leaders reach out to us at Produx Labs to understand how Product Operations can impact their org — and recommendations on what to look for in a hire. Recently, we had a thought-provoking discussion with Oji Udezue, VP of Product at Calendly, about their first product operations hire.
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Vision and strategic intents are core to product planning. You need to know where you’re going — and why. Another key element to successful planning, at any timeframe, is good data around where you are right now.
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Growth is rightfully the number one priority for start-up and scale-up software companies, but upon nearing an exit, establishing a path to profitability becomes the main focus. When that horizon nears, costs need to be addressed…
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Everybody in Product has subscribed to the importance of data as a driver of high-quality decision-making by now. But tragically few are able to do it. Enter: Product Operations — the art of removing obstacles from evidence-based decision making. Done right, it fuels a virtuous cycle of benefits…
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The job of a product leader is to provide the vision, the goals, and the guardrails. As you kick off your annual planning process, you need to get alignment around what’s your most important thing: your north star.
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If you’re enterprise, you typically have a large portfolio of products that all need work done to them, but it has to be balanced with your budget. Providing structure around that mess is not enough. You need to have a framework to know if they are the right choices for your business. You need this person to not just prioritize, but make a product strategy.
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I’ve often said that one of the biggest benefits to being a Product Manager for B2B SaaS products is that your customers generally stay with you for at least 3 years, if not 5 or more. That “stickiness” is inherent for a business tool because large companies don’t want to invest in change management every few months or even every year. Why? Because migrating between systems can be a huge time suck for IT teams and the other individuals who use the tools. It’s rare the the ROI for switching makes sense.
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This past week I was chatting with one of our clients about getting the development team involved earlier on in the product design. I’m a huge advocate for engineers having input early on and think it adds a lot to solution design.
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I’m excited to see a number of companies automating their operational product insights (“automated product operations” for short). Their product leaders had been running a mile a minute with multiple and competing priorities. Product and data were limited so prioritization was made based on the most critical and visible issues.
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Ideally, if you have a portfolio you’d know each of these metrics by product and other relevant segmentation to your company such as geographic or customer size diversity, but I thought this was a solid starting ground for most conversations.
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