#Prodmgmt Twitter Chat: Customer Development vs Revenue Software in a SaaS World! [Recap]

There are two main ways of making money from software development. Customer development or revenue software. These have different challenges and may suit different types of organizations. Part of the inspiration for this theme was Rich Mironov’s 4 laws of software development, so it was good that he spotted this and contributed his 2nd law that says these are opposing ways of working.

I suggested this topic as moving between one and the other, as I find it an interesting situation. I wanted to see how my experiences compared with others out there. Are there any good tips or tricks to navigating the choice? Especially in a SaaS world.

To find out how these affects product management in the real world we asked how this can be balanced? and what does it do to common tasks like prioritization?

Q1 Is there a balance between custom development work and subscription software?

Tremis had a list of thoughtful questions to this opening question, ending with this conclusion ;-)

Q2 What kind of data do you need to decide between custom built vs SaaS?

Q3 Does the balance of customer development and SaaS change w/ org/product maturity?

Q4 For those who have experience on both sides, what are pros/cons of each?

Q5 Does backlog prioritization operate differently in one or the other?

Q6 According to @RichMironov, there’re 4 Laws of Software Economics. Is there one that reigns above the rest?

Hope that you found our chat interesting. As you can see from the debate in the first question’s answers the common was view that there is no balance. It looks like the advice is, look at your whole product. Work out what your driver is, then commit to that.

You can catch #prodmgmt chat every Tuesday at 8pm EST.