3 Critical Questions for Your SaaS Product Strategy
How to know if the path you go down actually delivers value or not.
We all have been in this type of situation: you do all of the work: going through UX strategy, prototyping, designing and developing, hoping that the end result benefits people, your client or your organization. But the end result is not what you was expecting it to be.
“The core problem with so many businesses is that they’re based on what the business owner wants. They’re fantasizing about being the hero: “I’m going to ride in on my white ‘software’ horse, and save these poor people.”
By Hoy and Hillman.
What you need to do is to get everybody to take a step back before going heads down. It’s very easy to get wrapped up in day-to-day problems especially when you have features and functions list in front of you. A laundry list of things that absolutely have to be done. Everybody wants to dive straight into work without thinking over what’s worth doing.
Start here. Define where you are
The first thing is to understand where you are at in terms of UX?
There are 3 levels of UX maturity meaning there are 3 ways of operating where you are either doing a strategic work or you are just trying to plug holes?
Level 1. Operational (Most common).
Most organizations and teams find themselves in this place. Our heads are down, we just trying to figure out how to do all of that stuff in a time we have to do it. Or we deal with bugs, we did a quick prototype and it’s not working.
Level 2. Tactical (More mature).
Solving business/user problems. You are focused on how this benefits us as organization if we roll this function out. You are focused on how it affects the end users. You’re little more focused on business issues and users issues but you’re still very head down trying to figure out how we’re going to do this.
Level 3. Strategic (Where you need to be).
You take a step back and say — “Should we do this in the first place? What is gonna happen as as result?”.
Instead of just saying — “Yes, let’s do that! Let’s go!”. You take a step back and say — “Wait a minute, is this the right thing to spend our time on over the next weeks or months?”.
3 critical questions you need to ask yourself first
1. What’s worth doing?
What is worth our time? What can we reasonably accomplish with the budget and resources we currently have available? Does it solve the problem we’re trying to solve? Is the outcome valuable to us?
2. What are we creating?
You need everybody on the team (developers, designers, project managers, stakeholders) to have a shared understanding what we’re creating.
3. What value does it provide?
What value goes out to users as a result of doing this, and when they do the thing we are expecting them to do, what value comes back to the business? If people find it very easy to use your online services, then they more likely to purchase it, if they more likely to purchase it, that means you make money. That’s value back to you. What value comes out and what comes back in?
a) You should understand your users first. Who are they, what their environment is like and how it affects their behavior, emotions. Then proceed to the next question which is…
b) What experiences are valuable to them?
c) How is our product going to be different from competitors?
In a nutshell it solves a lot of problems before they ever start. You want to define WHAT you’re doing, WHY you’re doing this, and WHY IT MATTERS before you invest any time in actually designing or building.
This article was inspired by awesome Joe Natoli and his book ‘Think first’.
What’s next?
Ask yourself those questions first. Once you set your mind in the right direction, start getting to know your users closely. This should be the next big thing to do on your UX list. I will be sharing my approach very soon. Stay tuned.
Remember: If you have a bad process, the outcome is a bad product.
Exclusively published for Medium.
Written by Alex Gilev, a user experience (UX) consultant with a focus on creating innovative software for SaaS companies who want big results.
Alex has developed and delivered strategies & design Fortune 500 companies (Johnson&Johnson, Compeed, PayPal), Bay Area companies, top US digital design agencies, and helped startups on the early stages of seeding.
He also studied ‘Disruptive strategy’ at Harvard Business School, ‘Business models’ and ‘Value proposition design’ at Strategyzer academy.
Thank you for reading!