Identify your Cloud Customer Journey with CX Touchpoints

 
 

Becoming a SaaS vendor is not easy, not when you have thousands of vendors competing in your category. The website ChiefMarTec has a cool visual that shows 8,000 vendors offering marketing technology solutions. And this number is up from ~6800 in 2018.

The growth in various categories in 2020, is also shown on the website, shared below. 

 

To differentiate yourself based on features is well-nigh impossible in such a scenario. A key is to focus on the complete Customer Journey and the overall Customer Experience.

Cloud Customer Journey

Looking at customer acquisition, engagement and retention, you need to provide a delightful customer experience at all CX touch points. 

Hence your cloud customer engagement strategy is vital for revenue growth and recurring sales. While a detailed strategy and framework is too large to post here, analysis of CX touchpoints and creation of a Customer Journey Map is a good start.

 [Ping me if you need a PowerPoint version of the CX Journey image above.]

 

Product Success

 Product success is often misunderstood as:

• launching the product or a new version
  
• Releasing a cool set of features
• Getting x downloads (X being any thousands or millions) in a period
• Increasing engagement by y% over the previous period 

and so on.

My suggestion is that true product success happens when you get sustainable, long term, profitable, revenue from the product (and/or associated services). Incidentally, this is how long term businesses are built.

If you cannot see a path to sustainable, long term revenue, then your product success is probably transient.

Of course, all this depends on the product category, apps, e-commerce websites, SaaS solutions, deep tech. solutions or others.

How NOT to Hire a Product Manager (PM) Series

The Perfect PM Candidate?

In my career, I have hired or interviewed product managers for different roles in multiple countries and firms. I have also had friends and colleagues attend interviews from PM roles. There are many ways to select someone for a PM role. Unfortunately the process does not work perfectly every time.

For startups hiring PMs, or firms setting up a PM team, you must avoid certain pitfalls. In the next few blog postings, I will talk about real experiences of people as they tried to hire PMs or candidates who interviewed for the role of a product manager.

 

BTW, there are many articles available online on how to hire a technology product manager. Here is one link from Ken Norton, link to a medium.com article, and here is another one from productplan.com. You can review these if you are planning to recruit a product manager for your team or startup.

Keep reading this blog for more posts in this series.