SaaS Product Management

March 2022

Welcome to The Cirrostratus Group March newsletter.

Many people are starting to venture out more for in person conferences and meetings. This is an excellent source for SaaS conferences, including physical and hybrid conferences, that are planned in 2022.

If you are looking to raise capital for your SaaS business these are the 25 top VCs that are currently investing in SaaS.

Product management and talent management are two of the big SaaS challenges. See below for the current state of both and some key recommendations in both areas.

Paul Ressler

The Cirrostratus Group

SaaS Product Management

TSIA has recently released a report on the State of XaaS Product Management. Some of the important recommendations from the report are:

Gain clarity on your strategic direction and communicate and reinforce it broadly.
Identify your customers’ business outcome metrics for each industry segment and persona you serve and align the design and delivery of offers accordingly.
Validate that your offer portfolio is optimized for maximum recurring revenue capture during the land, expand, and renew phases.

Why it is important for your SaaS product managers to understand AI and machine learning even if it currently isn't part of your software product? This article describes why.

This Harvard Business Review article is not specifically about SaaS although there are SaaS references and examples in it. It does give a great practical perspective on executing business experiments and using the results to change your business. Business experiments on pricing, features and distribution are all key skills which product managers need to have and it should be part of your culture.

SaaS Talent

Finding, recruiting, hiring and retaining the talent you need to efficiently and effectively run your SaaS business is one of the most important things to focus on in your SaaS business. It has not gotten easier as outlined in this report by Openview Partners on the State of the SaaS Talent Market but there are things you can do to address these challenges.

The recommendations and takeaways in this report include:

Remote work is the norm
Compensation expectations have risen
Time to hire has doubled for external recruiting teams, consider hiring your own internal recruiting team
Demonstrate a unified vision of the role across the recruiting team since lack of alignment is the #1 red flag for recruits.

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