Video: Objective SaaS Product Development

Transcript: SaaS product development has to be managed with discipline in order to lift the growth of the business.

Hi, I’m Justin Talerico with Married2Growth and I’d like to provide some perspective on two of my recent articles.

The theme running through both my pre-launch and post-launch articles is objectivity driven by user feedback. But there’s more to it than that. The subtext is a lack of emotional attachment to features and solutions.

Over my last 10-plus years in SaaS, I saw emotional attachment cripple product development far too many times. This is tricky because we all need to be emotionally vested in our products in order to have true ownership and deep commitment. But when that attachment crosses the line from doing what’s best for the greater good of the product, business, and customers, to doing what an individual wants, things get hairy.

I’ve come to call this feature belief. It’s essentially blind faith that a feature, or its execution, is driven by an individual’s opinion. Not the market. Not customers. Not users. Not even research.

Investments made based purely on feature belief are dangerous. They exert a huge opportunity cost and rob enterprise value by displacing opportunistic innovation and iteration.

As senior leaders, we need to walk the line of objectivity in SaaS product development management without robbing teams of ownership and love.

Learn more in my recent pair of related articles on Married2Growth.com. And thanks for tuning in.