The Missed Opportunity of Agile SaaS

I’ve been thinking a lot about how my SaaS experiences have shaped my thinking on agile management, and visa versa. SaaS and agile present complementary aspects that enable a uniquely symbiotic relationship. Agile aims to help businesses increase responsiveness to customer needs, while laying a foundation for continuous improvement. SaaS opens up real-time customer communication and product delivery channels, while simultaneously establishing a long term customer relationship. The high velocity at which SaaS customer value can be understood and then delivered through the SaaS product enables faster, more accurate fulfillment of SaaS customer needs to reduce SaaS churn and drive SaaS growth. IMHO, adopting and mastering agile software development, agile marketing and pretty much agile everything should be a priority of every SaaS business.

A Little Agile History

The roots of agile software development and agile marketing lie in agile manufacturing, lean manufacturing and total quality methodologies. The original total quality goals were very simple: increase quality and improve productivity. Two goals that were seen as opposite were made to be one. As global manufacturers mastered total quality, they upped their game and looked to increase responsiveness to customer needs, while maintaining productivity. Again, two goals that were seen as opposite were made to be one. This is the origin of agile.

Agile software development and agile marketing have followed similar, but unique paths. Buggy software, product delays and death marches were the norm in the 90s. A groundswell formed around the idea of taking the agile principles that had been so successful in manufacturing and applying them to software. Could we turn a death march that produces bugs into an efficient production line that produces quality software? In 2001, this culminated in the publishing of the Agile Software Manifesto. Since then, agile software development has become the industry standard.

Today, we are seeing a similar groundswell around agile marketing. The emergence of modern marketing as an essential revenue driver has led to high pressure performance, inflicting many marketing organizations with the same ills that plagued their pre-agile software engineering peers: too much work, too little time, and too little understanding in the rest of the organization of the work required to produce quality results.

The Forgotten Agile Customer

As agile evolves and adoption expands throughout the SaaS sector, one thing concerns me greatly. What happened to the customer? The very first line of the principles behind the Agile Software Manifesto begins: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer…”, but all I ever hear is SCRUM, collaboration, backlogs, sprints, and story points. The voice of the customer has somehow been lost. On most agile development teams, a single ‘product owner’ represents the voice of the customer and must compete with CEOs, VPs and …read more