A STRONG SAAS PRODUCT TEAM: MISSION POSSIBLE

Building a strong SaaS team is easy—a walk in Almaden Lake Park. You just need: 

1. A brilliant idea that will gain lots of traction and funding flowing from every angle
2. A dozen failure-tested, exit-rich entrepreneurs and developers with heaps of experience and extensive networks
3. A big coffee machine with hand roasted, free trade, caramel-scented Arabica

On a more serious note, creating an efficient team to develop a Software as a Service product takes vision, wisdom, and motivation [both financial and ideological].

While even the strongest software development product teams cannot make a weak idea shine like a diamond for users and investors alike, a good talent pool is capable of

• recognizing a weak idea and pivoting toward a more promising format;
• taking an okay idea and polishing it to become the market leader;
• turning heads of VC fund professionals, who recognize a strong team as a heavy-weight investment factor.

As THE Peter Thiel puts it:

“We live and die by our founders.” 

Peter Thiel

According to Harvard Business Review, human capital tops the chart for factors that persuade VCs to close the deal: 95% mentioned a founder as a decisive factor, followed by business model, market, and industry [74%, 68% and 31%, respectively.]

In this piece we will review some of the key software product team roles as well as fundamental principles of a SaaS product team structure.

What Is a SaaS Product Team?

The SaaS product team includes a similar mix of talent as most software product teams: a founder, a product manager, a business analyst, a designer, a marketer, a developer, a tester, an accountant. Both the quantity and quality of these roles vary depending on project size, specialty, maturity, and funding.

However, due to SaaS product characteristic features like a monthly subscription-based model, multi-tenancy architecture, strict security, and scaling requirements, it’s critical that all of the above specialists be familiar with SaaS product development.

What Does a SaaS Product Team Do?

A SaaS team is responsible for end-to-end software product development, including the following key functions: product development, marketing, legal, financial, and technical.

The regular SaaS SDLC includes these key stages from a technical point of view:

1. Product ideation
2. Product design
3. MVP development
4. Feedback gathering and product enhancement
5. Development and testing
6. Deployment
7. Product launch
8. Maintenance and upgrades

Please note that in line with last-minute DevOps best practices, most processes are tightly intertwined. Whereas security and testing are employed early, the development, integration, and testing stages are continuous. All SDLC phases are geared towards security, scalability, and high availability.

Some of the critical outbound activities are marketing and BizDev related:

1. Market and ICP analysis
2. Competition research
3. Branding and messaging
4. Pricing model development and implementation
5. Online and offline promotional activities
6. Sales activities
7. Public relations

The legal and financial fronts are as riddled with nuance for the SaaS development teams as the technical realm. 

While the marketing and product ownership side of success depends a lot on creativity, entrepreneurship, and business visionary qualities, your company’s legal, financial, and technical success depends on religious compliance with existing SaaS requirements.

SaaS Product Team Structure: Product, Specialty, & Hybrid

There are different approaches to product team structure. You will notice that the first type aligns with the principles of Agile product development—a lot.

Single Product Ownership: One Product Manager per One Product

Under this SaaS team model, one product manager is responsible for one product across all stages and functions: from the strategy, roadmap, design, pricing, and marketing to development and testing. 

Skill Based SaaS Team Structure

Under this hierarchical setup, companies will go for a product manager type that is not a jack of all trades, but rather has a distinct proven expertise in a specific/specialty niche, for example marketing, recruitment, design, or engineering.

This team architecture is a best fit for bigger companies and the project manager (PM) roles could be compared to an operational deputy of a chief technical officer (CTO), chief financial officer (CFO), chief marketing office (CMO), etc.

Product Squads

This last type is like a hybrid of the above two approaches, where a certain, bigger SaaS product is divided into services and a product manager is assigned to guide this function-based product feature to its full development.

So inherently, these bigger pieces of a product do have a specialization of their own right, but the PM of a squad will be responsible for an end-to-end product development of this segment.

How to Build a Strong SaaS Product Management Team

The mission highlighted in the heading is akin to how to build and run a democratic country with a booming economy and happy citizens. But on a humbler scale.

While this goal comes across as insurmountable or at least tough to conquer, let’s highlight some of the battle-tested principles that have worked for many successful Software as a Service products.

Selecting Your SaaS Team Players

A few principles will guide you in hiring capable talent for your project:

1. Let your network know about the head hunt

But forget about your network candidates during and definitely after the hiring process. It’s good to take advantage of contacts when you are on the mission to find the talent, but nepotism and bias will not get you far in Silicon Valley.

2. Quality above quantity

Two-thirds of the world’s population may be your addressable market, but they are not all going to be your clients tomorrow. Minding your burn rate from early on is critical. Hiring high quality candidates for key positions is another non-negotiable success factor.

3. Attitude above tech skills and experience

Okay, a footnote to this insight says: all three prerequisites are a default requirement and all your candidates should have amazing experience and tech skills in their field. However, an optimistic attitude and positive mindset is a priority must-have. The best of the tech talent—when toxic—will lead you downwards, not upwards.

4. Scale slow first, scale fast later

Only hire more people when you have the figures in your analytics and the funds in your pocket to pay them. Don’t rush to scale and hire a customer care call center to cater to thousands of calls a day before you even have an MVP. But if you are in the post-MVP period, be ready to scale with demand.

5. Outsourcing is normal. You don’t have to do it all inhouse

It’s okay to outsource software development, testing, or application security to a reliable software development partner. It’s okay to allow a PPC agency to run your campaigns. And it’s normal to get an influencer marketing firm to take care of your influencer relations.

SaaS Product Team Development

Defining your initial organization structure and hierarchy is great from the get-go. Things will change, but as long as you know that your key people are indispensable to each stage of product development, you can grow a team around them. Alternatively, stick to the one PM, one feature model for tight cooperation.

This model is easy to scale out as well. You can lift and shift the existing structure to create more features and products. The replicable set up’s consistency and observability are beneficial for smooth scaling.

Motivation and feedback are the wall-bearing structures in any team, so ensure that you have team building events and market-competitive incentives, bonuses, and social benefits for high talent retention rates.

Implanting Product Vision into Team Fabric

Getting your team involved in the project is one task. But getting them devoted and invested in your SaaS company is another level of inter-team interaction.

Here are some simple tricks—when done with open minds and the right corporate ideology—to raise team loyalty:

1. Make a “video on” requirement for weekly team meetings. In the era of remote work, people may prefer to keep their videos off during calls with the team for convenience. A corporate requirement to have a weekly sync with video on will discipline meeting attendees; but more importantly, it will bridge the gap between online and offline communication, bringing staff closer to one another.
2. Involve your team in the decision-making process and brainstorming sessions. The activities, when even the junior team is involved in the process of making executive decisions, tend to elevate the level of responsibility, ownership, and involvement.
3. Conduct monthly C-level meetings that cover key events, achievements, and new horizons. Keep the team on the same page and updated.
4. Allow for interdepartmental shifts if office based. Immersion into another team’s life can take multiple forms, from shadowing a person for one day to sitting in on their meetings or working from their office. Whatever is suitable for your company, exchange deepens product understanding and will lead to a smoother SDLC.
5. Enable the framework so that your team can use the system for some time, creating a bond with your SaaS solution from a customer perspective.

For your team, creating a bond with the product is a vital part of creating a bond with the company.

Now let’s run through the SaaS product team structure for different departments.

SaaS Product Development Team Roles

The framework that moves SaaS product development forward every day, for big and small players, is the core of an Agile team. Your Agile team includes:

Product Manager

A SaaS product manager will be responsible for getting as many insights as possible from the founders and market, creating documentation based on these insights, and organizing a team of designers and developers to create this product accordingly.

Developer / Software Engineer

A software engineer is responsible for the coding part, deployment, integration of the application, whether web or mobile. There are different types of programmers: from simple backend / frontend definition to a more granular specialization, like a mobile app developer with MEAN stack skills.

UX/UI Designer

The UX/UI designer produces a visually pleasing interface with intuitive navigation and user-friendly functionality that converts users into buyers and later to loyal brand ambassadors. In an ideal SaaS product team organizational structure, a designer will work closely with the product manager, users, developer, and the project’s business analyst [BA] and participate in product owner’s syncs.

QA Tester

With the right combination of manual and automated tests, modern QA experts are capable of delivering a better code with less technical debt, shorter downtime, and near-endless scalability, shortening time-to-market and driving customer satisfaction. In a niche as competitive as software as a service product development, speedy delivery of new features is a priceless advantage.

SaaS Product Marketer

The marketer’s role is critical from the creation of a detailed SaaS product marketing plan to its implementation, with the highest short-term and long-term ROI. Online and offline activities, guerilla marketing, LinkedIn groups, vanity marketing, and working with influencers and a colorful palette of social media channels are just some of the dozens of tools in a CMO’s arsenal.

When your company grows, you are likely to split your functions into more granular roles. See SaaS Team structure example from one of the most successful sales and marketing tools out there, HubSpot, when it was 100 team-members young. 

Let’s review some more SaaS team structures. First, some of the core teams on a mature SaaS project.

SaaS Marketing Team Structure

A marketing team may include at different stages the following talent:

1. CMO [the person responsible for the choice of key channels, messaging, and vendor selection and supervision]
2. Digital marketer [jack of all trades, who has exposure to website, CRMs, tagging tools like GTM or Hot Jar, and advertising platforms like Google ads, LinkedIn ads]
3. Public Relations [the person who creates brand awareness by communicating online and offline with media and influencers]
4. Content writer [the person responsible for creating and maintaining the TOV, and producing content for a myriad of channels, including websites and social media]
5. PPC expert, outreach specialist [Google ads expert]
6. SMM manager [Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads professional]
7. Designer [person responsible for visual content and storytelling]

In most cases, some of these roles can be outsourced to external vendors or combined. This marketing scope duty split is for bigger SaaS companies with substantial marketing budgets.

SaaS Sales Team Structure

Sales team hierarchy is similar to that of a regular software product. But depending on if the product is B2B or B2C, you may have some respective shifts in the role and duty descriptions.

These sales roles split is characteristic of SaaS product development:

• sales development [outbound and inbound reps who work with warm contacts reactively and cold leads proactively to hunt business]
• account executives [these people will close the deals]
• account managers [customer success, they get to deal with a client from the moment of contract signing]

These sales roles are common:

• DOS – director of sales
• SDR – sales development rep
• MDR – market development rep
• AE – account executive
• CSM – customer success manager
• AM – account manager

Marketing and sales departments often report to a CEO directly or to a chief revenue officer [CRO].

SaaS Finance Team Structure

The accounting and finance department of a mature SaaS company will usually have these roles on the team:

• CFO
• controller
• treasurer
• AR [accounts receivable]
• AP [accounts payable]
• tax, payroll, and audit 
• legal 

Depending on the growing complexity of a software company’s team hierarchy, some roles may evolve to include managers and assistants in each of the sub-roles.

SaaS Engineering Team Structure

It is not uncommon for developers to found a SaaS product and then start doing their own full scope for full stack coding. As companies grow, and more and more developers join the team, these are some of the key roles:

• Project manager [PM]
• Business analyst [BA]
• Product designer
• Software architect
• Software developers
• QA testing engineers
• Application security expert
• DevOps engineer

SaaS products are hardly ever static; they grow in complexity and nuance with the services and features provided. This growth makes the engineering team structure more fluid and ever growing than with any other finite software product, which requires the occasional patch and bug fix.

5 Tips for Efficient SaaS Team Structure

1. First-hand Contact: PM with Customer

Ensure that you minimize the number of touchpoints between your product management and the customer. 

In the best case scenario, your product manager has full access to your customer and will drive the discovery stage single-handedly.

This seemingly basic idea has a far-reaching impact on the product’s relevance to its ICP [read sales and traction]. If you have one person communicating with the customers, then handing over the information to the PM, critical insights might slip through the cracks of this chain.

2. Ensure Tight and Regular Interdepartmental Exchange

Observability into the bigger picture of project development and exposure to other departments’ missions and tasks allows team members to have a well-rounded understanding of their own mission. With this 360-degree view of the process, each department produces results that require less back and forth later, even though the initial stage may take longer.

Setting up team-wide sync and building the hierarchy so that teams closely communicate with each other daily is the ideal framework. 

3. Smaller Teams = Better Accountability & Ownership

A two-pizza team rule comes from Amazon and has been adopted by many other technology businesses, including Software as a Services companies.

“We try to create teams that are no larger than can be fed by two pizzas. We call that the two-pizza team rule.”

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon

Smaller teams that could survive on munching on two pizzas for lunch, would perform best for many interpersonal reasons. But the key is that this structure pairs perfectly with Agile development. Accountability and ownership levels are quite high in smaller teams, when people are responsible for a specific scope of work in a specific time frame.

4. Design Your Team for Scalability

Microservices architecture allows businesses to develop multiple features independently from each other without many technical hiccups along the way. Continuous improvement and new feature roll out is done all the time in SaaS.

So, a perfect product development team structure will include multiple similar teams, each of which is developing a specific feature or service, but all of which have a similar set up.

This consistency eases the entire workflow for team members, partners, clients, and users.

5. Nurture Loyalty and Brand Devotion for Steady Teams

In the era of tech talent deficit, team stability is in constant danger. 

There are too many variables in the world of software development: your tools evolve, new competitors come out, the market keeps shifting with new technology making old ways irrelevant and obsolete, or users make you change your product.

If you cannot keep your tech startup team structure stable, you will have an extra layer of complexity for the staff who do stick around, making their earliest turnover even more probable.

Recruitment and onboarding are extremely expensive and time consuming [the rare resource more expensive than money itself], so investing in team motivation is a financially sensible idea.

Strengthen Your Inhouse SaaS Product Team with Extension Team

In the work from home era, SaaS entrepreneurs often go for scaling with the help of extension teams or dedicated teams.

There’s no harm in outsourcing. Now that the world has gone global, and almost all tech savvy professionals speak English, it’s quite beneficial for your bottom line. Having a core C-level team from the US is a good success factor. But having junior software engineers paying rent in San Jose is not a sensible move. 

Dev.Pro, for example, works with over a dozen US-based clients, with a few projects exceeding 200+ head count. Read a case study on our cooperation with Salesloft, a leading SaaS sales and marketing software solution.

Expert Knowledge Bites on SaaS Product Teams