The Tell Tale Signs That You Need Product Management

The timing will be different for every software company. But, one thing is certain. If you’re a SaaS Startup looking to grow past the initial success phase, you’ll inevitably need to introduce mature product management disciplines to succeed. When is the right time? Well, right from the beginning, of course! But, if you’re getting a late start, here are 25 signs (in no particular order) that the time has come. If you start nodding to more than a few of these, start making plans to hire your first product guy (or gal).

• There isn’t a common vision across the company of where the product is headed
• No one can quickly answer the questions; Who is our target market segment, what are their biggest problems and why are we uniquely positioned to solve them?
• Lots of #1 priorities; trouble figuring out which innovations to pursue, which ones make most sense right now
• You don’t have specific, measurable, high level business goals that are driving product decisions
• Your product strategy is reactive and often driven by competitive activity
• You can’t point to a strategic product plan or high level product roadmap
• Aside from sales and revenue, you don’t have a clear scoreboard of KPIs and metrics that show ongoing product success
• There is a general lack of data driven product decision making
• Lots of busy-ness on the product development team without true business results
• You’re having trouble scaling focus across a growing development team
• Product development teams are spread way too thin OR your development team is overloaded across too few areas
• Product strategy is owned by someone in the engineering organization
• Your innovations lately have been incremental…evolutionary, not revolutionary
• Most of your product backlog is made up of bugs, sales team requests and direct requests from customers
• Product innovations are being released with lukewarm customer response
• Your sales team pitch is inconsistent with the product’s true value proposition and positioning
• Developers are constantly being hounded for product enhancements by client services and sales
• When you release new innovations, your client services teams are caught off guard and not prepared to support the updates
• Your executives are still involved with day-to-day product enhancement decisions and struggle to scale decision making
• Product innovation ideas are typically pushed from the top (executive level) down to the development teams
• Day to day product design and development decisions are being made based on personal opinions, and not end user expertise
• You don’t have a constant stream of market discovery insights fueled by 1×1 interviews with target users
• You’re experiencing long development cycles and underwhelming customer response to innovations
• There’s low trust and morale across the product development team; a general feeling of too many stops and starts
• You have lots of unrealized product value; in other words, your customers aren’t aware of all the great capabilities your product has to offer and / or don’t know how to effectively leverage them