5 core principles for a successful SaaS transition

Seeing SaaS as a technology strategy is a common mistake that leads to companies getting tied up in technical discussions and architectural considerations. However, evaluating through a business lens is what really helps transitions take off.

By building senior leadership alignment from the outset, companies gain the foundations to keep their goals on track. This is about engaging in the business questions at the heart of the transformation, asking questions such as ‘How will the model help us innovate faster and build a competitive edge? How can it support growth ambitions and nurture stronger customer loyalty?’ Clear direction and agreement on these points is critical to setting SaaS in motion.

It’s a misconception that companies have a long multi-year SaaS transformation ahead of them and plenty of time to perfect their product. They also think they have a strong revenue stream, captive market, and solid customer base as a safety net. The reality is that a lengthy cycle time makes it difficult to get valuable customer feedback and a drawn-out plan leaves them open to competitors owning the space.

Rather than focusing time on making a product ‘perfect’, launching a minimum viable service as quickly as possible can validate whether the approach delivers meaningful value to customers. It’s an opportunity to collect feedback and test assumptions on whether the functionality and experience meets their needs. By concentrating on this initial use case, companies can accelerate time-to-market and ensure product-market fit.

SaaS paves the way for greater innovation, empowering businesses to rapidly adapt to market changes and quickly implement new features like AI. But streamlined development cycles don’t happen without system and cultural changes—agility needs to be baked into the transformation from the beginning.

To prepare systems for spikes in growth, minimizing on-premises infrastructure can remove the heavy-lifting of maintenance with automated upgrades and patches. Setting well-defined key metrics to measure cycle time will also help assess where operational improvements are needed across feature releases, system uptime, and time-to-response issues.  Keeping teams focused on delivering against these core metrics instils an agile mentality central to SaaS. Ultimately, investing in creating nimble systems and teams from the start means that new capabilities can be implemented faster, and tenants can be onboarded quickly as you scale.

There’s no SaaS without “service”, yet many software companies get stuck in a product mindset. Beyond building the right product, becoming a successful SaaS provider relies on going deeper into the customer journey and building an exceptional end-to-end service experience.

Once you’ve uncovered a 360-degree perspective of your customers’ needs, these insights should be the North Star for guiding service decisions. This includes everything from how you help customers adopt features and grow their usage, to how you engage with them, and how quickly you can address issues. With a service mindset, refined go-to-market, and customer success model in place, companies can keep increasing customer value.

Team silos commonly stunt transformations, with organizations leaving it too late to consider how functions like sales and marketing will need to adapt to the new business model. This can lead to roadblocks, misalignment, and churn during the go-to-market phase. Bringing everyone on board with the business strategy early on is therefore crucial. By educating them on the benefits and tenets of SaaS, it creates a collaborative environment where everyone is motivated to realize the rewards.

Programs like AWS Marketplace List & Sell can help you find AWS Partners to collaborate with who can accelerate your time to market, help you launch on AWS Marketplace, and enable your product-led-growth.

Successful SaaS transitions hinge on thinking holistically about how the organization needs to transform with an action plan that stimulates change across people, processes, and technology. Keeping these five tactics in mind can help you avoid common pitfalls as you transform, but if you’re struggling to build momentum you don’t have to go it alone. Whether you want to migrate applications, optimize SaaS solutions, or build products with the latest AI capabilities, learn how expert guidance and comprehensive resources from AWS can help you grow.