2024’s Hot Topics in B2B SaaS Product Management and Engineering
By: Shannon Bauman
Product and Engineering leaders from Mainsail Partners’ portfolio companies, along with several product experts from our network, gathered in Austin, TX, for a two-day Product & Technology Summit.
This year’s topics mirrored some of the biggest themes in B2B SaaS Product & Engineering today, running the gamut from AI to people management to capturing the value from ancillary products.
Here are four of the essential strategies that our product and engineering leaders agreed are critical to helping drive business growth at this stage and the top takeaways from each:
Integrate AI as a product offering, and as a coding tool
At Mainsail, we are thinking about AI integration as three distinct workstreams:
- AI tools and processes to support company operations (such as marketing and sales tools)
- AI-powered features to build into your own product to offer your customers
- AI-powered engineering dev tools to increase dev productivity
At the Summit, presenters focused on the latter two use cases. Product leaders shared examples of how they are building out new functionality within their products using AI, which was followed by an active discussion about lessons learned, pitfalls to avoid and processes to implement.
In addition, we dove deep into existing AI development tools that companies can use right now. Two tools that stood out were:
- Amazon’s CodeWhisperer: offers intelligent code review and analysis, aiding product teams in identifying potential bugs and performance bottlenecks to streamline the development process.
- GitHub Copilot: leverages AI to help developers generate code snippets and suggest relevant solutions, empowering product teams to accelerate their dev cycles and improve code quality.
Amazon’s AWS team was kind enough to send a team to the Summit to run a hands-on activity, enabling leadership to experience some AI-powered coding.
Uplevel leadership skills
In addition to many informal water cooler discussions about leadership, the Summit welcomed Bob Freeburg, CPTO at Mainsail portfolio company, Centerbase, to discuss a leadership approach known as “The Empowerment Dynamic” or “TED.”
Introduced by David Emerald in The Power of TED, it takes a traditional psychological framework known as The Drama Triangle and flips it on its head to present a more empowering approach to leadership. Bob brought the framework home for us, recognizing the challenges that product leaders face while serving as people managers, too.
In the Drama Triangle, everyone falls into three archetypes: Rescuer, Victim or Persecutor, creating a dynamic that perpetuates power struggle. In the Empowerment Dynamic, these roles are defined as Challenger, Creator and Coach. Everyone is considered a resourceful human who can channel self-awareness and emotional intelligence to chart a better future for themselves and those around them. In TED, leaders shift their mindset to more empowering roles, and are better able to create high-functioning teams. He also emphasized the impact of a leader’s mood and behaviors that can affect their entire team.
Launch of Voice of the Customer Program
Mainsail’s Jess Bicknell, VP of Customer Experience, led a discussion on the importance of developing a strong Voice of the Customer (VoC) program.
A VoC program is a process for programmatically seeking feedback from customers about their experiences with your products and services, and then turning that feedback into usable insights. By running VoC programs continuously, you can create a product that uniquely fits customer expectations, driving value and most importantly — driving retention.
To put this concept into action, the group conducted a breakout session in which we discussed ways to build out a successful Voice of the Customer program within our own companies. Fundamental to an effective VoC program and an essential takeaway from the session, she stressed, is developing a strong communication loop between Product/Engineering teams and customer-facing teams (Implementation, Support, Customer Success). This loop is too often missing or incomplete, and fortifying it will have extensive follow-on benefits.
Don’t Forget the Value of Ancillary Products
Adam Keys, VP Product at JobNimbus, and Marko Djukic, CTO at Linenmaster, both Mainsail portfolio companies, teamed up to discuss the value of developing ancillary products, covering topics that ranged from data as a monetizable product to the impact that ancillary products can have on your NRR and retention rates.
The pair argued that the initial reason to build an ancillary product (increased revenue) doesn’t give credit to the full potential of the add-on (retention!). When you build the right ancillary product and incorporate it in a meaningful way, you may increase revenue, but more importantly, you will improve the value proposition of the entire product, creating customers who end up being stickier to the core product offering.
This topic has been trending across Mainsail’s portfolio companies as well as the industry at large, so it was helpful to gain a fresh perspective on how to think about it.
And more…
The Summit covered additional topics ranging from successful tools to lessons learned from veterans of B2B SaaS companies. Perhaps most importantly, the leaders who gathered at the Summit had many opportunities to form professional relationships with each other over food, drinks and activities.
We are already looking forward to next year’s Product & Technology Summit.
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