When drafting a product roadmap, the tension between the vision and the specific customers often comes into play. Founders and product leaders love to talk about the grand vision and seeing the future from the beginning. From my experience the grand vision was a product of analysis of many individual customers. I have seen many failed product teams who were afraid to focus on any specific customer. They didn’t want to overoptimize the product for too small of a customer base and become a consulting company. It is true that there is a danger where one large customer is hijacking your roadmap and you start getting so deep into features or special built integrations that you fail to build a mass market product. More often the “visionary” product has no grounding. The teams that can’t waste their time digging deep with their early adopters miss the opportunity and never build anything useful for anyone. When we launched DocuSign API , we had 3 (three) customers who had access to a pr
Whenever you talk to a person who works or found a startup they are talking about innovation. Having spent the last 15 years in Enterprise SaaS I started wondering how innovative are we in technology today? When I think about monumental technological breakthroughs, I think about the invention of the web browser and the mobile phone. Most of the current enterprise SaaS startups do not do anything monumentally different, can we even call it innovation? Can we map this situation to historical technological breakthroughs like railroads, telephones, and airplanes? For instance, the railroad evolution is a good proxy for the current situation: the big breakthroughs were the Bessemer steel process and the steam engine by Richard Trevithick. There are other huge steps in the railroad technology but for the most part the work after that was laying out the railroad tracks. Was laying out railroad tracks innovative? Not in comparison to a breakthrough like the steam engine. Did it require