How to manage customer objectives vs own company's objectives for a B2B SaaS product
Asked by Joris Roulleau:

Hi all,

I'm in the B2B SaaS product space and giving JPD a try, having had no good or formal legagy system in place to manage ideas (problems, opportunities) so far. Product development is driven by a small number of customers, as well as the broader vision for the product.

I am trying to make sure every idea on the board is explicitely connected to a business objective (goal). I'm stumbling, somewhat to my surprise, on the issue of whether, and how, to differentiate between customer/user objectives for the product (e.g. save time, reduce costs, enable new revenue streams etc.), and our own objectives for the product (e.g. grow revenue, improve market penetration etc.).

This feels like a very obvious conundrum that only my inexperience or a long week make confusing to me, and wondered how folks are tackling it.

I'm thinking, at the end of the days, if the objective is valid, it doesn't matter if it's a customer's or the company's, there's no need to differentiate. Or my company's objectives can be considered implicit and don't need to be surfaced here, ensuring the product is aligned with customers' objectives is what matters here.

Any thoughts on the topic welcome :-)

Thanks


Answers:
author: Adrian_Lester
body: I'm also in the B2B SaaS space so I feel your pain.

I've tackled this by using the Goal field and I select the user objective most affected by this work, and a custom field 'Strategic Theme' which is also a select field and contains the company objectives. So far every idea we're considering manages to have both fields populated, and I can create separate roadmaps based on Goal or Strategic Theme. I found [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yp0q7YVYM4c) from Tanguy on how you can set up JPD very useful

comments: author: Joris Roulleau
body: Thanks, I was edging towards a similar setup, but thought it might fail the KISS test.

On reflection, being able to generate different roadmap views for different audiences would be useful so I'll go back to that idea and see if it works for me and colleagues.


author: Lindsey Strong
body: We also capture in "Insights" any documentation from the customer and identify the customer to help determine where the request came from, or if we're seeing consistent feedback from multiple sources.

comments: author: Joris Roulleau
body: Thanks, I'm also identifying the customer for the same reasons and to add a weighting element to the ideas.


author: Kevin Sniokaitis
body: Similar to the other responses we are doing dual categorization. We are utilizing Goal for our company strategic objectives where as a separate categorization for User Impact. In the latter I've connected the impact areas for our Users that then helps us balance work and prepares for how we will communicate the functionality to the user.


author: Freddie Bendzius-Drennan
body: They're going to be closely related for sure.

We have business objectives, in the form of OKRs, that we align to, and at the end of the day successfully achieving those OKRs is tightly coupled to delivering customer value.

An example of this is we have an OKR relating to churn reduction. That's a business objective to help us achieve our revenue goals (in conjunction with related OKRs around increasing net-new and cross-sell revenue). How do we successfully execute on those OKRs? By driving customer value. So for example if you can validate that building something to save customers time, reduce costs, can tie back to you achieving one of your OKRs (eg boosting retention), then you have tight alignment.

Hope that makes sense!