, Welcome to The Cirrostratus Group April newsletter. I expect that SaaS Artificial Intelligence applications will become more prevalent and I've written a blog post on the implications to your customer onboarding when you add AI capabilities to your product. The key to Lean Startups and to Lean growth is running the experiments. There's great information below on how to structure these experiments. Agile development is the primary development methodology used by SaaS providers. Gartner has recently released their Magic Quadrant for Agile Planning Tools and it is available here for free from Collabnet. I'm always interested in hearing about your experiences with delivering cloud applications. Paul Ressler The Cirrostratus Group

On-boarding for SaaS AI Applications         If you have a vertical SaaS product focused on a particular industry or a SaaS product focused on a particular functional area you are probably thinking about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used within your product. There are a variety of product strategy and technical issues that will need to be addressed and of course you should only incorporate AI if that is the best way to address your customer's business issues. Once the above issues have been analyzed and a decision has been made to include AI in your product there are implications for successful customer on-boarding and the professional services required. This is especially true for applications where the AI application is based on data that is unique per customer. Professional Services for SaaS implementations are comprised of both the people who do the work and the process used and AI has implications for both. Read my blog post to understand the people and process issues associated with on-boarding customers for your SaaS AI Application.

The key to Lean Startups and to Lean growth is running the experiments. This article by  Kieran Flanagan, VP of Marketing at Hubspot has a lot of great practical information on how companies set up their growth experiments. This article from Mind The Product outlines how to use data to generate hypotheses. Remember growth experiments are not just for startups, everyone should design and run experiments and make decisions on the results.