Competencies for a SaaS Enterprise

As majority of the SaaS platform are created based on 'Software Product' idea there is a strong bias towards Product Engineering capabilities among the SaaS enterprises.

To create achieve growth, SaaS enterprises need to on-board, retain and grow the number of customers and end-users leveraging the platform. Following competencies are significantly critical for any SaaS enterprise to achieve profitable growth.

1. Product / Platform Engineering -

This is at the core of the SaaS enterprise. These competencies are at foundation for developing the software product / platform. They help to define the key business challenges and develop a customer-centric, technological, and financially viable solution. The software platform may be developed from scratch or configured and assembled leveraging low-code / no-code platform.

2. Business / Technology Consulting -

The software solution should become part of business ecosystem. It needs to be integrated with upstream and downstream business processes of the organization. This requires consulting capabilities to integrate the solution. Business / Technology Consultant need to think holistically going beyond software features. Consulting capabilities need to be deployed to solve customer’s business issues of growth / cost / working capital / compliance as appropriate. Functional and technical consultant also plays role to configuration of the platform to on-board customers.

3. Solution Engineering -

Having created integrated solution design through consulting capabilities, one need to integrate SaaS platform with organization's technology ecosystem. Solution engineering capabilities help to integrated systems with diverse set of technical interfaces and reusable assets from the SaaS platform. This requires knowledge about technology landscape of customer organization as well as the technology capabilities of software platform.

4. DevOps

DevOps has dual role to play – automation of engineering pipeline for SaaS platform engineering as well as customer on-boarding. It also helps in developing telemetry between operations and SaaS platform development.

5. CloudOps

All the SaaS platforms are hosted on the cloud platform. The hosting may be on multi-tenant or single talent based on customer needs. CloudOps enables infra provisioning, upgrade, trouble shooting, access management, etc.

6. Data Analytics Capabilities

SaaS platform enables enterprise to look at the customer specific and intra-industry business process usage. It helps to collate high volume of structured and unstructured data (variety) at rapid pace (velocity). This creates opportunities to monetize the data. Search, AI/ML and actionable insights are key capabilities the enterprise would need to mint this big data.

?7. Program Management

All SaaS player aspires that customer on-boarding is as simple as downloading and implementing apps on the mobile device. However, on-boarding on enterprise software platform (CRM, ERP, HCM, Supply-chain, CLM etc.) may take anywhere between 6-9 months to 12-18 months based on complexity of organization or business process. Such programs have multiple moving parts and require dependencies to be managed across many systems. Hence program management becomes critical skills.

8. Customer Support

Customers and end-users leveraging SaaS platform will require service support for technology as well as guidance on business processes. Customer Service desk capable of handling business solutions, technology solution and infrastructure related queries becomes an essential requirement.

9. Continuous Improvement

Due to cusp of technology and business process, SaaS enterprise is at unique positioning of scaling-up the business by augmenting the cloud infrastructure. One can drive profitability by optimizing the software platform as well cloud infrastructure. One can influence customer satisfaction by improving software features. This requires systematic applications of lean six sigma, design thinking and agile ways of working.

I respect the fact that like any other business enterprise, SaaS enterprise would also need people operations, sales, marketing, administration, and finance skills. To stay focused on technology services related skills I haven’t elaborated them.

SaaS enterprises thrives on subscription revenue. Subscribers are multiplied based on network effect of customers and end-users. Small teams with diverse set of competencies are essential to scale the enterprise.