ONE THING on Product Leadership

A friend (let’s call her Sarah) leads product for a SaaS company that has traditionally sold to smaller businesses. Their growth strategy calls for them to move into the enterprise space where deal sizes are larger and more profitable. To be successful, they need to become best in class at one of the many things their platform offers today. Not all of them. (They don’t have the resources for that.) Just one of them.


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This is a risky strategy because they’ll have to focus nearly all of their resources on that one thing, ignoring a long list of obvious product gaps and requests from existing customers. Those smaller customers could churn if they feel ignored.

Sarah’s company is taking this downside risk because of the upside potential of this pivot. That’s not to say it will be easy. Sarah must work closely with engineering, design, support, services, sales, marketing, and even finance to set expectations on what will be in the roadmap going forward and what will not. This is product leadership. Yes? Do you have similar stories?