Software Product Success: 3 Key Operational Excellence Drivers

Software products, offered as Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription model, attract significant investor and market interest as they provide clients with one of the quickest paths to realize business value.

While most of the focus remains on the core product functionality, features, and usability—and quite justifiably so— the ultimate business success of a product hinges on the customers’ experience with the product and the quantifiable customer value realized.

The science and engineering of SaaS operational excellence result from a relentless focus on defining, executing, measuring, and improving standard operating procedures in response to incidents and client requests. This, along with constant innovation, focused on improvising customer experience. Operational excellence as a strategic differentiator is not as often spoken about, but it remains a crucial part of value unlocking.

In this article, we examine a few key capabilities that the product operations function needs to develop to help companies differentiate their products through functional (feature) and operational innovations.

1. Evolve DevOps culture to the reliability of a system focused Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) mindset

DevOps and SRE are best visualized as integrated practices in the continuous value chain of reliably launching and running product features that meet an ever-evolving client need.

Simply put, DevOps practices focus on enabling fast, efficient, and continuous development and deployment of software product features. SRE brings in the user-centric view of how these product features are experienced, focusing on the system’s reliability impact on that experience. This requires a cultural shift to view system reliability not just as an operations problem but as a critical responsibility where all teams, including engineering, products, and operations, have a stake.

SRE is both a practice and skillset that organizations must invest in to build capacity. This practice will help reorient engineering and operations functions into an integrated whole governed by metrics that impact the end user. This perspective is critically important to break down organization silos, foster collaboration, and define the true ‘North Star’ of software product's success.

SRE, as a function infused and housed in operations will have a culturally transformational effect on how customer experience is perceived and impacted by all processes that contribute to achieving that outcome.

2. Develop hyper-automation capabilities and deploy at scale for constant operational improvements

Hyper automation is a discipline of systematically infusing automation into IT and Business operations across all activities and processes of software products. The outcome of such automation initiatives often leads to the reimagination of operational processes resulting in new ways of working.

Hyper automation initiatives that heavily leverage operational data to derive operational insights for preventive and predictive maintenance lead to a discipline of Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), a process of building, testing, and maintaining ML models as an operations discipline which can lead to impactful outcomes for both the business and clients.

Hyper automation is a holy grail of current operations with quantum benefits impacting operational efficiencies, reduced toil, improved employee morale, and an impact on improved customer experience.

Deploying automation at scale requires organizations to reorient their approach to operations from a cost function to a value-generating function. Operations automation is a key driver for expanding people capabilities, overcoming operational, and technical debt, and creating continuous operating leverage, which can plow back efficiencies quarter after quarter.

The discipline of building, growing and executing an automation pipeline with the same rigor as the product feature backlog will deliver operational savings on an ongoing basis.

3. Align operational success metrics with key client success metrics

Organization silos sometimes lack visibility and a line-of-sight between the work functional teams perform and its impact on client experience. A DevOps culture helps address the issue in some ways, but the metrics tracked here are still somewhat technical.

There is a need for a more direct alignment of business with operations, with both speaking the same language. This calls for technical leaders to build more profound domain expertise and talk about the lingo of an industry that impacts client outcomes.

The impact on client experience can be significant, with an organizational capability to translate key client impacting operational improvement initiatives to business benefits relatable to clients. This will build a virtuous cycle of aligning all corporate efforts to deliver a superior client experience.

Developing a customer-centric approach to operational excellence can have a transformational impact on an organization’s culture and the morale of teams. It will add a renewed sense of purpose with a streamlined alignment of organizational goals with day-to-day tasks when the positive outcome of these initiatives can be linked to the acknowledgment of progress, reward, and recognition. This will lead to superior customer satisfaction and, ultimately, product success.