In our “Going Multiproduct” series, we'll explore the go-to-market (GTM) process for adding new SaaS products to your platform. Drawing on our experience launching our white-label Employee Onboarding Solution, we’ve tailored this guide to pilot business leaders and product managers from conception to launch.
Build a Customer-Centric New Product
The journey from understanding market needs to building a product that perfectly addresses those needs is both challenging and rewarding. It requires a delicate balance of strategic planning, customer empathy, and agile execution, as well as dedicated resources and at least a year of your work life.
Folding in market insights and customer feedback ensures a better product-market fit and lays the groundwork for a product that continues evolving and succeeding in a dynamic market environment.
Plan Your Product
In the journey of bringing a software product to life, the planning phase sets the stage for its development, market introduction, and long-term success.
Product Comps
Our path to aligning our Employee Onboarding solution with market needs began with creating early product comps. These initial compositions served as a visual and functional blueprint, allowing us to envision how our product could meet the specific needs identified through our research. This early visualization was crucial for internal alignment and provided a tangible reference point for discussions with potential users and stakeholders.
Additionally, as a provider of white label services, showcasing the product under our client's branding and seamlessly integrating it into their technology proves invaluable.
Product Roadmap
Building on this foundation, we crafted a detailed product roadmap. This roadmap was not just a timeline of features and releases; it was a strategic document that aligned every planned enhancement and innovation with the market insights we had gathered. It reflected our understanding of the market's evolution, competitor movements, and, most importantly, customer feedback. By prioritizing features that addressed real needs and provided tangible value, our roadmap became a guide to achieving and maintaining product-market fit.
Minimum Viable Product
We built our minimum viable product (MVP) with just enough features to show early adopters and validate a product concept early in the development cycle. By launching with a core set of functionalities, our product managers and developers could test hypotheses, refine the product based on actual market needs, and gradually build towards a more comprehensive solution. This lean strategy accelerated the learning process, reduced our time to market, and helped establish product-market fit, focusing on continuous improvement.
If you’d like further information about the cost of building an MVP, check out our post, The Cost of Building a Minimum Viable Product.
Development in Motion
The product development process is the most focused and strategic phase of the GTM process. The team designs and develops a product that precisely addresses the findings from the market research. It involves iterative building, testing, and refining cycles based on feedback from early adopters and continuous market analysis. Key features are prioritized to ensure the product meets the identified demands effectively, while flexibility is maintained to adapt to new insights and feedback. Collaboration across departments—product, engineering, marketing, sales, partner success, and customer support—is crucial to ensure the final product meets and exceeds market expectations, setting the stage for a successful launch and sustained growth.
It’s important to note that the path from market research through each step of the product build is not linear. If your team works that way, I applaud and question your agility.
What we think it will look like:
What is actually looks like:
We can be proud of our ability to move fast, communicate aggressively, and pivot as demands require. It’s also true that as a company with an established core product, we could apply our best practices, existing systems, and positive working relationships to a startup mentality.
The meticulous planning and development phases are crucial for bringing a SaaS product to life. It's a complex, iterative cycle of building, testing, refining, and learning—a journey marked by challenges and requiring a steadfast commitment to innovation and quality.
Commitment to Expansion
Building a SaaS product is undeniably hard work. It demands a significant investment of time, resources, and intellectual capital. The process is often longer than anticipated, but it's also gratifying. By dedicating ourselves to this rigorous process, we ensured that the final product is a pivotal software solution that empowers our partners to offer powerful employee onboarding software to their clients.
Thank you for reading the second blog in our “Going Multiproduct” series. The first was Understanding Your Market. The other blogs in this series include Positioning Your Product, Selling Your Product, and Launching Your Product. Additionally, we have another blog series helping companies determine whether they’re ready to go multiproduct.
About HiringThing
HiringThing is a modern recruiting and employee onboarding platform as a service that creates seamless talent experiences. Our white label solutions and open API enable technology and service providers to offer hiring and onboarding to their clients. Approachable and adaptable, the HiringThing HR platform empowers anyone, anywhere to build their dream team.
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