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.

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!

They say everybody likes lists. Miles of virtual paper have been inked in pursuit of the “best recipes for chocolate chip cookies,” the “worst airline food,” and to complete the theme – the best diet plans. Ok then- we’ve got a list:
Ten Ways to Fail as a SaaS Company

As anyone who follows me knows – I use Twitter and TweetDeck to watch the “virtual conversations” about SaaS happening around the ‘net when I can. Today some time was freed-up by a conference call that was delayed so I fired up TweetDeck and took a look around. Imagine my surprise when I read a meme had started around a blog post touting single-tenancy for enterprise SaaS applications.

We’ve given a couple of webinars recently with our partners Apprenda (archived copy here) and OpSource focused on the key issues ISVs need to consider when developing a SaaS product. One of the areas we covered that received a lot of interest was “Platform as a Service” – PaaS and what it can bring to a SaaS product development project.

In this article, “Nearshore” refers to outsourcing software development to providers that are located in foreign countries in the same or adjacent time zones or that are geographically close to a client’s home country. For U.S. companies, this term describes outsourcing to providers located in Canada, Mexico and Central and South America. For companies in Western Europe, nearshore providers are logically located in Eastern Europe, the Middle East or North Africa. At Scio, we work primarily with customers in the U.S. using a combination of U.S.-based and nearshore resources from our Delivery Center in Morelia, Mexico.