February Edition 

I’m in Morelia this month with our production team and the first week I was here we had almost continuous rain! I know the weather in the US has also been crazy this winter, but here in the central highlands of Mexico, we’ve had our share. Mudslides have covered small towns, washed out roads, and caused a lot of flooding. For this time of the year, it is very unusual for this part of Mexico to see so much rain.

So, if this email finds you snowed in or in the path of a lot of rain over the past month, at least you know you’re not alone! And if it is any comfort, our weather this week has gone back to “normal” – which is days in the 70’s with occasional clouds.

This month is pretty busy for me – it’s great but it would be nice to be able to slow down once in a while and just concentrate on one thing at a time. It isn’t going to happen, but I can dream. We’re seeing a steady increase in our work and feeling we’ve put the worst of a bad time behind us. I hope that is the same for you.

Best Wishes!

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Haut Tech: SaaS Insights from Scio Consulting

We’ve been looking at our service offerings and have increased our focus on getting projects to a stage where they can verify the vision behind them at the earliest possible point and into the market, if they are market-based projects, rapidly with a set of value-based features. We feel this approach is important for clients – typical development cycles for new SaaS products or service automation projects tend to be in the range of 12-18 months. Our approach typically yields a first “proof of vision” in 3-4 months and a product that provides the key value features in 6 months or less for most projects. I wrote an article about the philosophy behind the idea for our blog last week titled, “Lean into SaaS.” I don’t expect many to recognize the link between Lean practices and software product development instantly – it is still a fairly new idea although it is gaining a lot of ground this year. It fits well with the Agile philosophy and development methodology that we also adhere to, but on the “outcomes” side – it has been very useful to assess how it impacts our clients’ projects. It is something I will be talking about a lot this year – I strongly believe that projects that don’t check back against both end-users’ expectations and market reaction early greatly increase risk and lower the ability to reach a positive cash flow or ROI in a reasonable period of time.

I’ve said it before, but if you want to keep up on some of the most interesting stories of the past week in SaaS – Justin Pirie’s “This Week in SaaS” summary continues to be very strong. His focus this week on the problems SAP has been having moving towards SaaS products echoes many recent conversations we’ve had with industry ISVs. Having expertise in your field is just part of fielding a successful service online. Developing products for Internet-based audiences requires a different set of skills and knowledge, which is why so many traditional vendors either buy a company with existing products or “spin out” a separate entity to carry the project. If you haven’t been following Justin’s weekly posts, I encourage you to give them a look.

As Justin points out, Google, on the other hand, is highly experienced in putting out SaaS products and has launched two new products this week, Google Buzz and Google Fiber. To me the most interesting point came when user feedback from their Buzz product was quickly met with significant change in the default security settings for the application. Many pundits took this to be a “misstep” on Google’s part, but I strongly disagree. Getting products into the field will always yield “aha’s” that product designers didn’t expect. What marks an experienced company is their willingness and ability to react quickly and effectively – and that is exactly what Google did over this past weekend. It is a case study in what all companies need to understand about the value of the user community in Internet-based products and the difference in how experienced companies can quickly readjust their services – if they get their products out with the idea that the market and end-users will refine their feature sets.

All in all – if you think about this single “lesson learned” in product development for online products I think you will agree there is a lot to be said for getting in front of users early and building a feedback loop into your thinking from the start.