SaaS and Subscription platform — What constitutes a product transformation?

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any mission and goals: How directly does your product contribute to one of your company goals. Ex- Moving x%age of customers from on-prem to cloud, could increase company revenues by y%age.</li><li>Impacts: Does your product impact all of your company’s products/services. If yes, how do you go about capturing the ‘Why’, ‘Who’ and ‘What’ of each service. Is there a crisp template to capture details like packaging of service, selling motions, customer segments and monetization methods of each service. Once this data is collected how is the data analysis done on similarities and variations across all services/products.</li><li>Arriving at areas of transformation: How do the pm’s arrive at their hypothesis and validate them? How in-depth is the competitor research. Does the new Features list cover all RTM’s — Sales tools and platforms, Self service and channels/partners/msp’s portals. Will the new Features/capabilities list move the needle on company goals.</li><li>Standardization — If there are multiple diverse cloud services, standardization of processes, features and capabilities becomes a key focus. Ex Are all services aligned to adopt one set of standards provided for upgrades, downgrades, co-terming, auto renewals, manual renewals, sales led renewals & grace periods during renewals. Ex- Two different customer subscriptions are up for renewals. One of them was discounted more than other during initial sales. During auto renewal how would the system calculate and apply the uptick %ages (some price increase). Would the calculation logic consider any higher discounts given during initial sale and balance out compared to other customer subscriptions.</li><li>Prioritizatio

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n: Is it completely data driven matrix to avoid any bias. How frequent are the socialization exercises and steering committee meetings.</li><li>Product Management(PM) methodology: If there is a large team of PM’s collaborating, is there a broad framework defined to follow. Do the PM’s get more time on product ideation, user, market and competitive research or more time gets spent on stakeholders management. Transformation may require heavy focus on ideation, user, market and competitive research.</li><li>Execution methodologies — If you exceed over 1000 Epics/User stories, Scaled Agile becomes a necessity. How granular are the dashboards to track progress at each stage. PM, PMO, Engg, QA, UAT dashboards may be needed, rolling up.</li><li>Operationalization — Due to the large size of Ops teams is there a well baked engagement model with — Sales, Sales Ops, Quoting, Deal Management, Pricing, Finance, Revenue ops…. How well are the feedbacks addressed.</li><li>How many levels of success metrics are defined — How is the north metric defined and mapped with other metrics. What are the leading indicators (enabling them leads to conversion), guardrail and pseudo metrics. External customer facing metrics (starting from acquisition, cac, ltv, conversions from trial to paid, mrrr, nps). Internal metrics — no. of transformative features getting created, internal impacts measurement, adoption and operationalization metrics. How often are the metrics revisited to avoid them for redundancy.</li></ul>Obviously there is so much more to a transformation depending on an unexhaustive list of variables. This attempt to provide a summary from one ecosystem.</article></body>

SaaS and Subscription platform — What constitutes a product transformation?

Disclaimer: To avoid sharing any proprietary information inadvertently, I have kept all the points generic and tried to share only publicly available information.

Background: I was fortunate (or may be not) to be part of a two year journey, which has led to some valuable insights on leading a platform transformation. But what is a transformational program compared to other portfolio of programs in a large company.

Use case: Let us start with an ecosystem of 30+ cloud services (products-multiple offerings). The offers could be IaaS, PaaS or SaaS. On further peeling there is usage based services (metering, rating) and non-usage based services. Some of the services could require an upfront payment commitment, while other could have a mix of pay-as-you-consume, paid in arrears, as well as flavors of term (period based) subscriptions. Add to this different units of measures per different services (per device, user, user to device ratio, per compute hosts, points per second of use), variations to consider in overages (over consumptions) calculations, supporting different models of volume based discounts, expansions & upgrades before, after or at time of renewals, which impacts co-terming (near term, forward) and it becomes an interesting landscape. (stopping further unboxing as hope you get the idea)

So what constitutes a Product transformation?

Company mission and goals: How directly does your product contribute to one of your company goals. Ex- Moving x%age of customers from on-prem to cloud, could increase company revenues by y%age.

Impacts: Does your product impact all of your company’s products/services. If yes, how do you go about capturing the ‘Why’, ‘Who’ and ‘What’ of each service. Is there a crisp template to capture details like packaging of service, selling motions, customer segments and monetization methods of each service. Once this data is collected how is the data analysis done on similarities and variations across all services/products.

Arriving at areas of transformation: How do the pm’s arrive at their hypothesis and validate them? How in-depth is the competitor research. Does the new Features list cover all RTM’s — Sales tools and platforms, Self service and channels/partners/msp’s portals. Will the new Features/capabilities list move the needle on company goals.

Standardization — If there are multiple diverse cloud services, standardization of processes, features and capabilities becomes a key focus. Ex Are all services aligned to adopt one set of standards provided for upgrades, downgrades, co-terming, auto renewals, manual renewals, sales led renewals & grace periods during renewals. Ex- Two different customer subscriptions are up for renewals. One of them was discounted more than other during initial sales. During auto renewal how would the system calculate and apply the uptick %ages (some price increase). Would the calculation logic consider any higher discounts given during initial sale and balance out compared to other customer subscriptions.

Prioritization: Is it completely data driven matrix to avoid any bias. How frequent are the socialization exercises and steering committee meetings.

Product Management(PM) methodology: If there is a large team of PM’s collaborating, is there a broad framework defined to follow. Do the PM’s get more time on product ideation, user, market and competitive research or more time gets spent on stakeholders management. Transformation may require heavy focus on ideation, user, market and competitive research.

Execution methodologies — If you exceed over 1000 Epics/User stories, Scaled Agile becomes a necessity. How granular are the dashboards to track progress at each stage. PM, PMO, Engg, QA, UAT dashboards may be needed, rolling up.

Operationalization — Due to the large size of Ops teams is there a well baked engagement model with — Sales, Sales Ops, Quoting, Deal Management, Pricing, Finance, Revenue ops…. How well are the feedbacks addressed.

How many levels of success metrics are defined — How is the north metric defined and mapped with other metrics. What are the leading indicators (enabling them leads to conversion), guardrail and pseudo metrics. External customer facing metrics (starting from acquisition, cac, ltv, conversions from trial to paid, mrrr, nps). Internal metrics — no. of transformative features getting created, internal impacts measurement, adoption and operationalization metrics. How often are the metrics revisited to avoid them for redundancy.

Obviously there is so much more to a transformation depending on an unexhaustive list of variables. This attempt to provide a summary from one ecosystem.