by Mark Kromer

I’d like to solicit some discussion around this topic as I am researching this both for my current role as a traditional on-premises software product manager as well as for a research topic that I writing about for a marketing class …

I was wondering what differences I would find in my role as a product manager if the products that I was managing moved to the software-as-a-service model, accessed online over the Internet and were not traditional download or media-based software packages that required on-premises customer installs or professional services on-site to configure and stand up.

Would I need to change the way that I interact with customers? How would requirements gathering for product releases change? Clearly product releases would be quite different. But how would marketing and sales be impacted? One of the biggest areas effected would clearly be pricing. The entire sales & pricing models would change with SaaS.

Those are just a few of the questions that I see from a product manager’s role. When I started my Internet-based researched, I checked some of my favorite sites & blogs on product management and found these tidbits:

From On Product Management blog: Interesting take on the changing release cycles possibly not requiring the classic MRD or product management requirements management. I kind of saw this as more of the common “what is product management for?” argument that is not necessarily unique to SaaS. But I can see the push for less documentation and quicker cycles with SaaS. Obviously, the product management community is clever and flexible enough to accommodate SaaS release cycles while keeping control of requirements, VoC and flexible release cycles.

Pragmatic Marketing pretty much sums it up as they do with most issues related to product managers: you still gotta know the market.

Take this example from Dice.com for the job description of a “Product Manager – SaaS”:

This Product Manager is the business owner that defines the strategic direction and P&L for one or more Software as a Service (SaaS) product line.

The product manager is responsible for defining winning SaaS product strategy, communicate and execute the product roadmap with different cross functional teams including engineering, marketing, sales, support, operations, service teams that are located locally and in remote locations.

This PM is accountable for the success of its product line.

Sounds pretty straight-forward and indistinguishable from traditional product manager roles or what I have heard people refer to as a “CEO for products”. I have only been involved in business case analysis and pricing analysis on SaaS solutions because the companies that I have most recently worked for (Microsoft & Oracle) have not yet fully embraced the SaaS model. But in those anlayses, I have found it quite tricky to provide a viable cost/benefit or payback period based on low-cost subscription-based pricing. So perhaps being more proficient in the areas of financial analysis and pricing would be helpful for a SaaS-focused product manager?

What are your thoughts and experiences in transitions from a traditional product manager of customer on-premise based software to a SaaS model?