Many companies are motivated to transform into SaaS (Software as a Service) businesses, but they often struggle to navigate this journey with confidence. The mindset required for operating a SaaS enterprise differs from that of managing a traditional software company, particularly in terms of finance, organizational structure, culture, and sales approaches. A transformation of this nature often requires a fundamental shift in strategic and operational mindset.
This tool is designed to help you profile your company and examine all moving parts of your business along your SaaS journey. After careful consideration, it enables you to make informed decisions among various trade-offs. The aim is to ensure that you can think comprehensively not only about the technical aspects but also about the business facets of this transformation.
By using this tool, you'll be better equipped to consider all angles thoroughly, allowing for a more holistic approach to your company's SaaS transition. This custom lens can help you:
- Generating concrete strategies and forecasting for near-term plan.
- Making informed decisions after thorough consideration.
- Rethinking the trade-offs and the type of one-way or two-way door for decisions.
- Deepening cross-functions communication and enhancing mutual understanding.
This is a custom lens for AWS Well-Architected Tool to assess your SaaS business journey and implement both the strategic plans and product designs that will scale over time. This lens summarizes the AWS whitepaper - SaaS Journey Framework: Building a New SaaS Solution on AWS, addresses the challenges of the SaaS movements, and guides you to accelerate delivery of the SaaS solutions.
- Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the AWS Well-Architected Tool console
- Choose Custom lenses
- Choose Create custom lens
- Upload the saas_biz_custom_lens.json from this repo
- Choose Submit & Preview to preview the custom lens, or Submit to submit the custom lens without previewing.
For detailed instructions, see Creating a custom lens for a workload in AWS WA Tool
You should see similar view as below:
Walk through the questions with different functional roles:
- Phase 1 Business Planning : Executives, product managers and financial leaders. Technical and operational teams.
- Phase 2 Product Strategy and Roadmap Development : Product managers will be at the center of the effort. Technical and operational teams. Sales and marketing.
- Phase 3 Minimum Viable Service (MVS) : Product teams with product managers. Leadership team plays a key role to ensure all teams are delivering to the promise of the defined state. As you define MVS, it will determine who should participate. E.g. If you are launching a new onboarding experience, the product, sales and marketing teams should be involved.
- Phase 4 Launch / Go-To-Market : Leaders from sales, marketing, customer success and finance. Align with investor and board-level revenue expectations.
The framework is a dynamic working process that is not necessarily linear. While working on the product strategy, for example, you might revisit your business case and update it. Some activities might take place simultaneously.
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