The challenges of making strategy in B2B SaaS products

We all know different products and contexts require different strategic thinking. B2B SaaS and subscriptions are an important product category, and John Pearce has been working on it for a long time.

He shared multiple tips on how to think about and navigate the challenges faced in this context and explained his frameworks and models to create a strategy at Chargebee, where he currently is VP of Product.

Listen to our conversation, and read below my takeaways.

Takeaways

-We went deep into John’s repeatable process, which he calls “The power of 3”

• When doing research, use 3 different categories of sources. For example, customer feedback, market research, and surveys. And try to identify up to “3 trends”. Try to derive a mission, a sort of north star. Doing these missions at the team level helps make them more actionable
• Follow the trends with “3 key problems”. If you can solve 3 important customer problems per year, it will be a success

-John also uses semester or quarterly strategy review, which is also useful in these contexts.

-We covered the close relationship between company strategy and the product strategy (for example, selecting at the company level geography, or company type to focus on)

-One example of how to collaborate between product leaders: everyone researches and brings their 3 trends across the organization.

-We discussed B2B vs B2C, and the key differences highlighted were around speed to value and speed to churn (related to selling cycles).

-When the strategy is not good, sales request becomes a worse problem. Your strategy must be clear to the salespeople to make everyone more aligned and successful.

I hope you enjoyed it. If you have more insights and takeaways, please share them!

This article was originally published in ProductDirection.co. To get my latest content, you can subscribe here and join +2000 newsletter readers!