Haut Tech

I’ve seen a lot of different “roadmaps” for SaaS products lately. Some of them are good guides for specific questions. Some are simply misleading or poorly focused. But only a few of us are talking about the guiding thoughts behind a realistic roadmap that are critical to success.

When you develop products in a repeatable, production fashion, you have to step back occasionally and take the long view so you can properly discuss the process with clients. We’ve been involved in that exercise recently and I thought it might be useful to share the what and why of our approach to software development for online products.

Our move down the Lean and Agile road is not an accident. It is our core belief that customers will be more successful if they and their products and business processes are also Lean and Agile. We’re not alone in that thinking.

When I wrote the recent article “SaaS: 10 Trends for 2010″ I used the phrase “Best Case SaaS.” I realized from feedback and some thinking afterward though that many people don’t share my vision of what it is.

It is that time of year again – when analysts and writers of all stripes put their bets on coming trends for the new year. There’s some interesting stuff in them – check the links. But, since our predictions last year were right on the money – I expect nothing less this year.
Of course, I [...]

People say that marketing for “cloud services” are really over the top right now – selling a lot more promise than can be delivered. If that’s true, social media is somewhere out in the stratosphere of hype – pushed into orbit by leaders like Twitter and Facebook – I’ve heard many people say if they were trying to avoid reading yet another article on the wonders of connecting to “communities” on the web.

We recently started a project with a new client from the UK to develop a SaaS application for them using Innovation Games and found them to be very useful in developing and prioritizing product features and development plans.

I’ve noticed there are broadly two camps when it comes to developing new services for the Internet: Those entrepreneurs that feel they must do everything themselves regardless of the hurdles they face and those that want to focus on their core expertise and leverage outside services where possible.

In our first two podcasts for Haut Tech Conversations we covered service and pricing. Both subjects are critical for SaaS businesses to consider and understand in the context of their product. In the podcast we did yesterday, we went into yet another critical area – Marketing!

SaaS is not a “one-size-fits-all” business. There are many options now for platforms and services you can use and the number is increasing every day. A lot of the information available is laden with marketing hype. How do you make the right decisions?