Product Goal Setting

In B2B SaaS, product utilization should directly produce customer value—even (or especially) if your customer is not the direct user of the software. Most, if not all, net-new feature development should align to changes in product utilization that directly create more customer value.

Unfortunately, product goal setting often works precisely backwards from how it should. Typically, product or business leaders start with their business goals (e.g., grow revenue) and come up with product ideas to achieve them. Then, they try to figure out how those ideas will be valuable for customers.

But customers don't care about your startups ideas or business goals. They care about solving their own problems as fast, easily, and cost-effectively as possible.

Sustainable customer relationships and profitable customer growth happen when you can clearly show the customer you understand what’s important to them and evidence that you are moving the needle for them. The clearest indicator to your customers that you're doing that—and going to do more of that over time—is in how your team sets goals for improving the product.

• Create more win-wins for your customers and your business:
  Teams must balance customer needs and business needs to produce a sustainable product. Setting the right problems goals means that every product change supports both sides at the same time.
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• Greater focus with less wasted effort debating priorities:
  When everyone knows what's most important to customers and the business, it's much easier to say 'no' to everything else. Teams spend less time debating 'why' and 'what' when everyone sees how valuable the goals in front of them are.
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• Optimize improvements across every phase of the product:
  From the sales experience to implementations to activation, maintenance, and expansion, there's no shortage of things that can be improved. The way a startup sets product goals gives focus to which things should be improved and why.

• Define the core customer and user journeys for your product, and how they derive value from those journeys
• Capture the happy path and key failure scenarios for those journeys
• Gather analytics to uncover how customers and users experience the journey current state
• Create and prioritize goals for optimizing those journeys.

Assumptions:

• Blended fully-loaded salary rate for your team: $75 per hour
• Time needed to investigate and communicate each idea you won't pursue: 16 hours (4 hours x 4 people)
• Average Contract Value: $20,000 AAR
• Current customers: 20
• Customer churn caused by lack of product value: 15%

Benefits: $100,000

• Number of ideas not reviewed per week: 1
• Costs avoided by not reviewing low-priority ideas: $60,000
• Customer churn reduced by producing customer value more consistently: 60%
• Customer churn avoided: $40,000