Following our first article on the conflict between licensed products and SaaS solutions, we now present a necessary (but not always sufficient) list of SaaS operating principles. These principles are important whether one is building a new XaaS (PaaS, SaaS, IaaS) solution, or migrating to an XaaS solution from an on-premises, licensed product.
These principles are developed from the perspective of the product and engineering organization, but with business value (e.g. margins) in mind. They do not address the financial or other business operations needs within a SaaS product company.
1. Build to Market Need – Not Customer Want
Reason: Smaller product (less bloat). Lower Cost of Goods (COGS). Lower R&D cost.
Customer “wants” now help inform and validate professional product management analysis as to what true market “need” is for a product. Products are based on the minimum viable product concept and iterated through a scientific method of developing a hypothesis, testing that hypothesis, correcting where necessary and expanding it when appropriate. Sales teams need to learn to sell “the cars that are on the lot”, not sell something that is not available. Smaller, less bloated, and more configurable products are cheaper to operate, and less costly to maintain.
2. Build “-ilities” First
Reason: Availability, Customer Retention, and high Revenue Retention.
Availability, scalability, reliability, and nearly always on “utility” are now a must have, as the risk of failure moves from the customer in the on-premises world to the service provider. No longer can product managers ignore what was once known as NFRs or “Non-Functional Requirements”. The solution must always meet, as a bare minimum, the availability and response times necessary to be successful while scaling in a multi-tenant way under hopefully (significant) demand.
3. Design to be Monitored
Reason: Availability, Customer Retention, and high Revenue Retention.
Sometimes considered part of the “ilities” to achieve specifically high availability, we call this one out specifically as engineers must completely change behavior. Like the notion of test driven development, this principle requires that engineers think about how to log and create data to validate that the solution works as expected before starting development. Gone are the days of closing a defect as “working as designed” – we now promote solutions to production that can easily validate usage and value creation and we concern ourselves only with “Does it work as expected for customer benefit?”
4. Design for Easy and Efficient Operations – Automate Always
Reason: Lower COGS. Availability.
Everything we do to develop product and deliver a customer experience needs to be enabled through automation: environment creation, product releases, system analysis, database upgrades, etc. Whether this happens within a traditional operations team, a DevOps group, or product engineering, automation is part of our “whole product” and “ships” with our service solution upgrades.
5. Design for Low Cost of Operations
Reason: Lower COGS.
Automation helps us lower the cost of operations, but we must also be cognizant of infrastructure related costs. How do we limit network utilization overall, such that we can lower our costs associated with transit fees? How do we use less memory footprint and fewer compute cycles to perform the same activity, such that we can reduce server infrastructure related costs? What do we really need to keep in terms of data to reduce storage related costs? Few if any of these things are our concerns on-premises, but they all affect gross margin when we run a SaaS business.
6. Engage Developers in Incident Resolution and Post Mortems
Reason: Faster Time to Resolution. Availability. Better Learning Processes.
On-premises companies value developer time because new feature creation trumps everything else. SaaS companies know that restoring services is more important than anything else. Further, developers must understand and “feel” customer pain. There is no better motivation for ensuring that problems do not recur, and that we create a learning organization, than ensuring engineers understand the pain and cost of failure.
7. Configuration over Customization
Reason: Smaller Product. Lower COGS. Lower R&D Cost. Higher Quality.
One “core”, lots of configuration, no customization is the mantra of every great SaaS company. This principle enables others, and aids in creating a smaller code base with lower development costs and lower costs of operations. Lower cyclomatic complexity means higher quality, lower cost of future augmentation, and lower overall maintenance costs.
8. Create and Maintain a Homogeneous Environment
Reason: Lower COGS.
Just as the software that enables our product should not be unique per customer, similarly the infrastructure and configuration of our infrastructure should not be unique per customer. Everyone orders off the menu, and the chef does not create something special for you. The menu offers opportunities for configurations – sometimes at costs (e.g. bacon on your burger) but you cannot substitute if the menu does not indicate it (e.g. no chicken breast).
9. Publish One Single Release for All Customers
Reason: Decreased COGS. Decreased R&D Cost (low cost of maintenance).
The licensed software world is lousy with a large engineering burden associated with supporting multiple releases. The SaaS world attempts to increase operating margins by significantly decreasing, ideally to one, the number of versions supported for any product.
10. Evolve Your Services, Don’t Revolutionize Them
Reason: Easier Upgrades. Availability. Lower COGS.
No customer wants downtime associated with an upgrade. The notion is just ridiculous. How often does your utility company take your service offline (power for instance) because they need to perform an “upgrade”? Infrequently (nearly never) at best – and if/when they do it is a giant pain for all customers. Our upgrades need to be simple and small, capable of being reversed, and “boil the frog” as the rather morbid saying goes. No more large upgrades with significant changes to data models requiring hours of downtime and months of preparation on the part of a customer.
11. Provide Frequent Updates
Reason: Smaller product (less bloat). Lower COGS. Lower R&D cost. Faster Time to Market (TTM).
Pursuant to the evolutionary principle above, updates need to happen frequently. These two principles are really virtuous (or if not performed properly, vicious) when related to each other. Doing small upgrades, as solutions are ready to ship, means that customers (and our company) benefit from the value the upgrades engender sooner. Further, small upgrades mean incremental (evolutionary) changes. Faster value, smaller impact. It cures all ills and is both a dessert topping and floor wax.
12. Hire and Promote Experienced SaaS Talent
Reason: Ability to Achieve Goals and SaaS Principles.
Running SaaS businesses, and developing SaaS products require different skills, knowledge and behaviors than licensed, on-premises products. While many of these can be learned or trained, attempting to be successful in the XaaS world without ensuring that you have the right knowledge, skills, and abilities on the team early on is equivalent to assuming that all athletes can play all sports. Assembling a football team out of basketball players is unlikely to land you in the Super Bowl.
13. Restrict Access
Reason: Lower Risk. Higher Availability.
Licensed product engineers rarely have access to customer production environments. But in our new world, its easy to grant it and in many ways it can be beneficial. Unfortunately, unfettered access increases the risk of security breaches. As such, we both need to restrict access to production environments and ensure that the engineering team has access to appropriate trouble shooting data outside of the production environment to ensure rapid problem and incident resolution.
14. Implement Multi-Tenancy
Reason: Lower COGS.
Solutions should be multi-tenant to enable better resource utilization, but never all-tenant to ensure that we have proper fault isolation and appropriate availability.
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