Essential Guide To B2B SaaS Product Strategy

Starting a business in the tech industry involves a lot and that means you have to stretch your hands a bit to make it with a new product.

With the stiff competition in the tech industry, you need a superb product to build a successful SaaS company. Product strategy means a lot to anyone intending to start a SaaS company in this era. 

Today, more SaaS products are being built, and you have to come with a unique project to stand out from the rest of the park. You will need a strong product strategy if you intend to outshine the big names in the SaaS industry. 

But what exactly is a product strategy, and why is it crucial to any business intending to grow? In this article, you will learn how to build a unique B2B SaaS product strategy in simple steps. 

What is Product Strategy?

A product strategy is an existing link between product vision and the roadmap. This is a detailed strategy of converting your concept to a product that users will like. 

You can use your product strategy to align and rally resources and teams in your organization to build a brand and successful product in the market.

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Why is Having A Product Strategy That Important?

If you look forward to investing in a SaaS company, you need a product strategy to push your product forward. When the challenges of building a future product come your way, a product strategy is all you will need to keep yourself on the right track. 

A product strategy provides a clear picture of how your product should look like for your teams. It can help you develop a sales and marketing team that you will need to introduce your product and penetrate the market. 

As you enter the SaaS industry, you are likely to face many challenges, which you can easily escape with a product strategy in place. Without a product strategy, you won’t be able to cope with the market’s challenges, which means you won’t deliver the value your customers expect from you. 

How do you build a product strategy that works for your team and business? Here we guide you through a framework that will guide you into building a product strategy that puts your brand ahead of the competition.

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Elements of The Best SaaS Product Strategy

When you build a winning product strategy, you have to equip yourself with all the key elements. Here are some of the key elements your product strategy should address.

What is Your Product Vision? 

A product vision is one of the most important things your product strategy should address. A product vision is a statement that defines why a customer needs your product. It should explain what and why of your products. 

It should also explain the what and why of your product, with the latter being the most crucial. A product vision should be more concerned with explaining why your product matters a lot in the product. 

How is your product going to improve the target users’ life? How will the product change their business? A product vision acts as a north star that keeps your business going, which means it should be bold and ambitious. 

There are more turns and twists involved in building a successful SaaS business, and with a product vision, you can always remain on the right track.  

Set a product vision that is realistic and achievable. However, it should not be something easy to achieve. If the product vision you set is too easy, it is not likely to impact your target customers. Also, your customers will not differentiate your product from your competitors if you don’t have a unique product vision.

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Know What Your Customers Need And Their Pain Points 

Now, do you even know what your customers are looking for in your product or brand? As a business, when setting a product strategy, you should dig more into your target customers. 

Learn more about their customer buying behavior and what they are missing out on in the existing products.

Build a strong buyer persona by defining who your real customer looks like. Here are some questions you should ask when coming up with a buyer persona:

• What goals do your customers have? 
• What are some of the challenges your customers are likely to face daily? 
• How do your customers define their success? 
• Are your customers willing to spend to find solutions to their pain points? 

When you answer the above questions, you will know how your product fits in and how it can improve your target customers’ lives. 

Define your buyer persona because knowing how your brand will impact your customers is crucial. No customer will spend on your product if they cannot see anything valuable in it. 

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Set A Product Positioning Statement 

Once you have a clear product vision and a full understanding of your customers, you will now be able to come up with a positioning statement. You can use different frameworks to help you build a positioning statement for your product. 

When setting your positioning statement, you should describe who you are helping in the market (customer), who the solution is for, and what makes your solutions different from what is currently in the market. 

It is not easy to come up with a positioning statement. If you find it difficult, you should take a break and ask yourself why it’s not that easy for you. You can revisit your product vision and ensure your know more about your target audience to make it easy to position your product.

Set Product Objectives And Goals 

You need to measure how successful your product is in delivering an impact to your customers. When you set product goals and objectives, you will easily evaluate if you are executing your product strategy to the fullest. 

Your product goals and objectives may shift over time. For instance, at an early stage of your business, you will be focusing more on brand development and how you will be engaging with your customers. Goals like customer lifetime value, revenue per account, and customer acquisition rate will be more important to your business. 

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Define Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

When you’ve set your product vision, goals, and objectives, you need to set some metrics that define your success as a business. This way, you will be in a position to measure whether your product strategy is taking you places or not. You will need KPI to establish your growth and success as a SaaS company. KPIs may include things like:

• Roadmap velocity 
• Business growth goals
• Product usage metrics 
• Product adoption metrics 

Define your KPI at an early stage of product strategy. This will ensure you don’t change your definition of growth and success once you start executing your product strategy. 

KPI should show you how you are successful in executing your product strategy. It should also help you identify goals and objectives that work for your brand.

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Know Your Competitors 

The SaaS industry and market is one of the most competitive. It means when entering this market, you should conduct competitor analysis. Find out who your real competitors are and what makes them stand out from others.  

If you have competitors who offer the same solution to customers like you, you should learn more about their product strategy. In your research, you should also find ways to make your brand unique or different from what your competitors offer. 

It could be that the solution you offer targets small businesses and private individuals while your competitors are focusing on the enterprises. Or you offer simple solutions while your competitors are dealing with more complex solutions. Dig more into your competitor profiles and learn how they differentiate from your business.

Market Analysis: Learn More About Your Market 

In this context, the market means the external environment where your product lives. In this environment, you should be more concerned about many things like competition, state regulation, political stability, and other issues that may affect your product strategy. 

What changes are happening in your customer environment that may affect the solution you are offering directly? Are there any complementary products in the market that may affect the delivery of your product to the target customer?

You should also find out if any new businesses are planning to enter the market and how that will affect your business. Learn how the broad economic impact of these new entries on your product strategy. 

Many external market factors may affect your product strategy as a business. You are only going to focus on a few of those external factors if you are more resource-oriented. Market analysis will become a more useful thing to your business in the long run as your business grows and you prefer to invest more in resources.

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Building A Product Roadmap 

At this stage, you should now focus on the Minimum Viable Products (MVP). The reason is that you already have the right goals, objectives, and vision for your business. You have also done product positioning, which makes it easy to build your roadmap.

Creating an MVP helps you outline and validate some of the assumptions you made when coming up with a product strategy roadmap. 

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Validating Your Roadmap 

When you’ve already set your roadmap, you should proceed to leverage your customers to validate if your product strategy has focused on solving their problems. You should find out if the approach you choose resonates more with your target audience.  

You will be in a position to validate the roadmap by sharing product features with your target customers, interview customers, and use surveys. This is possible once your business and customer base has grown and you also have the resources that you need for validation.

Use the same audience that helped you come up with your product strategy in the initial stage of growth. Arrange for an interview with those customers and find out what they say about your product strategy. 

Share wireframe and screen with your interviewees and bring your early roadmap to life. Also, you should use the feedback you get from your customers to revise your product strategy.

Execution Of Your Roadmap 

You will now be ready to start building your product once you validate the product roadmap. Use the agile approach to execute your roadmap and get all the early features faster into your customers’ hands.

When you have real customers using your product, you can gain critical insights that can help you understand how the features and solutions of your product resonate and which one you will have to revise.

Once you are done executing the product roadmap, you should collect customer or user feedback. How users view your product out there is critical when you build a product strategy. You need this information to optimize your brand and creating a product that relates to your target customers.

You can use the in-app method to collect user feedback on your product. Establish efficient feedback management to help you understand what impact the feedback has on your product.

Final Thoughts 

A good product strategy should take you through your business growth. It should act as a strong pillar to the success of any SaaS product.

Creating a product strategy is not that easy, especially if you are new in the SaaS industry. You have to look into the key elements discussed in this article and get how it looks like to develop a product strategy. 

You can use the strategic framework that has been outlined in this article to start building a product strategy that will work for your business over time.

Your product strategy should be able to adjust when your business grows with time. That means the product strategy you develop should be dynamic to help you meet all the challenges you face on the way. When your customer base grows and the market environment changes, your product strategy should always be there to give a solution.