Beyond the Roadmap, or What Product Managers can learn from Linkedin.

Have you ever wondered why #linkedin never introduced a post scheduling tool? 

Many Product Managers argue its obvious feature desired by many users, so it should get to the TOP of the priority list. 

The truth is, it didn’t align with Linkedin primary goal: 

building a vast professional network for individuals and corporations to connect, promote services, brands, and ideas.

As a content creator, my pain-point is real. I want to plan and schedule my content on Linkedin. Instead, I end up paying extra for a post scheduler in addition to paying for a Linkedin premium subscription. 

This highlights LinkedIn's success, a robust business model, and the need for Product managers to switch their mindset 

from “building a feature” to “building a product strategy aligned with business goals” in a “way that customers would love”.

Beyond Roadmap: Product Management is more than building Features

Many Product Managers focus solely on the roadmap, assuming it's enough. However, digital products encompass more. They must generate leads, be demoed, purchased, maintained, and renewed at a certain price, to a certain audience, through certain channels. 

High-performing Product managers look at products the same way as Business owners look at their business, holistically, making decisions that positively impact organizational financial goals. 

There are 3 goals that every financially-oriented organization cares about :

• Grow Market Share 

• Grow Revenue 

• Increase Bottom Line

Grow market share

To gain control over a portion of the total addressable market (TAM), new customer acquisition is a crucial competitive goal for SaaS companies.

To achieve this objective, Product teams must make decisions and engage in activities that go beyond feature building:

1. Qualified Leads Generation: The #productmanagement team provides Marketing and Sales departments with a detailed analysis of the target customer persona and explains the product's value proposition.

2. Sales Motion: To outperform competitors' deals, Product Managers need to ensure that discounts or value-added services/products are available for the Sales team.

3. Competitive Positioning: Conduct a thorough 4Ps market analysis (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) to define the product's competitive positioning. Once defined, consider the following decisions: - Reconsideration of product packaging and pricing - Expansion of the product line - Establishing partnerships to acquire new technical capabilities - Establishing partnerships to bundle up with complementary products and services, thus extending the product reach - If the product is mature (cash-cow), decide if extending to new geographical areas is a viable strategy - Partnering with Marketing to increase product awareness or designing the product's market positioning.

4. Sales-Driven Roadmap: Conduct sales win/loss analysis and focus on building features that will help the sales team overcome customer objections more easily.

Grow Revenue 

Acquiring new customers is expensive. The Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC) is typically 4-5 times higher than increasing revenue through existing customers or enlarging the deal size. Product managers can have a more influence on revenue by leveraging existing customer base.

• Grow revenue through upsell or cross-sell 

• Grow revenue by offering additional services

• Increase average deal size by acquiring larger customers and moving upmarket 

Grow revenue through Upsell and cross-sell 

Tiered Pricing: Implement tiered pricing models encouraging customers to upgrade for additional benefits. 

Increase deal size: Launch add-on products or build integrations between complementary products. Identify the most pressing customer pain points and introduce them as paid features. Creating appealing bundles enhances the Average Selling Price (ASP) and fosters customer loyalty. 

Grow revenue by offering additional services 

• Paid onboarding services. Add tiers to differentiate between regular and premium onboarding if the infrastructure allows.

• Community Memberships: Establish a premium community or membership program providing exclusive access to resources, forums, and events. Offer additional perks, like early access to new features or priority support.

• API Access and Integration Support: Charge for access to advanced API features or provide integration support for clients looking to integrate your digital product with other tools and systems.

Grow revenue by Moving Upmarket

Acquiring larger clients leads to increased deal size  (higher annual contract value) and contributes towards revenue growth. Salesforce implemented this strategy back in 2017 by shifting its target focus from SMBs to Enterprise clients.

Moving upmarket requires Product Managers to conduct a thorough analysis of Enterprise customers’ needs and build a Roadmap that satisfies those needs. The focus of product development, when moving upmarket, typically concentrates on:

• User permissions for more complex organizational structures. 

• Advanced security controls: authentication, access control like geo-location or IP management, secure data storage, data encryption, etc. 

• Compliance requirements:  GDPR, HIPPA, data centers based on geographical regions of clients, etc. 

• Advanced account administration tools: to manage data access aligned with organizations’ policies

• Open API: for customizations, and out-of-box third-party integrations critical for Enterprise clients toolstack

In addition to the roadmap, a Product manager should assist in creating:

• Personalized or dedicated support

• Migration programs

• Personalized or Premium onboarding programs.

Increase Bottom Lines

Increasing customer retention directly affects an organization's bottom lines. The Cost of new customer acquisition is approximately 7x larger than renewing existing ones.That’s why Increasing customer retention by just 5% can boost the company’s profits by at least 25%. When an existing customer renews, an organization saves money on inbound marketing (SEO, social media campaigns, content creation, etc.) and outbound sales motion, such as paying sales reps and technical engineers.

When designing Churn Prevention programs, consider the following: 

• Onboarding. Ensure that customers complete onboarding. Not onboarding the product is proven to be the most common reason for churn. Introducing personalized or guided support services should be considered.

• Drive feature adoption. Launching a feature is not enough. A constant analysis of user engagement is required to ensure that features gain the necessary traction and create client stickiness. It is always better when a feature is automatically enabled. If that is not possible, and a user should control the feature settings, then track data and encourage engagement. In the SaaS world, features that are enabled by 35% - 40% of your clients are considered to perform well.

• Continuously Improve Your Product. Making incremental improvements to user experience and maturing product features through iterations have a positive impact on your product’s Net Promoter Score and create customer satisfaction.

• Multi-Year #saas contracts and Subscription models. Moving customers to a fixed multi-year term plan forces more commitment of resources from a customer, creates product stickiness, and shields SaaS companies from the risk of sudden cancellations or customer defections to competitors. 

As you can see, the role of a product manager is comprehensive. While having the right strategy with the right roadmap is core of the Product Management role, focusing solely on product functionality is not enough. Looking at the product holistically is required to be able to make business-oriented decisions that will positively impact organizations’ financial goals.