#operations

One thing I’ve noticed when talking to startups is how DevOps and product management are adopted to solve many of the same problems. While I think most companies will eventually require both, I’ve come to believe that it is more valuable to invest early in DevOps than product management.

While many product development leaders obsess over the positive habits their teams should adopt, they rarely pay enough attention to the downside of bad habits and over operationalisation.

Assembling your team is one of the most important responsibilities for any founder or leader. But, most startups I’ve worked with fail at effectively onboarding new staff, which can lead to false starts and failure.

Investing in product design (i.e., user experience and user interface design) can lead to fantastic outcomes for product development teams of all sizes because it reduces the number of iterations required to produce a great product or feature. However, most product companies approach product design in manner that excessively slows down the development of new solutions and blows out budgets. This has led to product designers being ostracised from many initiatives and decision-making processes/rituals. By embracing a DesignOps approach to product design, companies can instead move faster and get more done with less resources.

Despite all startups being resource-poor relative to what they are trying to achieve, many founders invest in solutions (e.g., specific product features, technology improvements, and internal systems/processes) that require effort beyond what is desirable from an ROI perspective.

While every company should approach this somewhat different, there are a handful of principles that apply to most product companies that I think you should consider.

Customer success is a critical function within the B2B software industry. It is typically staffed by customer success managers who are tasked with managing the experience of existing customers throughout their journey with the product, with the assistance of automation. Every B2B software startup eventually finds itself in need of a customer success function, but most struggle to spin one up without a few hurdles and misfires. This is because the focus of customer success is very broad, with diverse goals and roles required to succeed.

Assumptions around both expected value and effort required are usually wrong, often dramatically. The outputs of ROI algorithms can lead you astray if the inputs are incorrect, making prioritisation based on this method an exercise in futility. This is why teams should factor confidence into their ROI estimations, recalculate and reflect on ROI estimates after work has been completed, and assemble around long-term areas of focus where multiple hypotheses can be tested.

Today, software-as-a-service (SaaS) is the standard business model for monetising business-to-business software. In the SaaS model, software is licensed to customers through an ongoing recurring subscription (e.g., a customer might pay $25 per month for continued access) or another form of operational monetisation (e.g., transactional fees on application usage) which also includes customer services.