Do product managers need a special skill set for SaaS offerings?

I have been struggling with this question for a while. Thought, I’ll take a shot at providing insights on facts and myths about product management responsibilities in a SaaS environment. High level themes (planning, strategy, GTM plans etc) remain the same. However, the differences arise in the way each theme is handled in an on premise Vs SaaS environment. The bullets below provide a high level overview of the differences:

Theme : Product Development
Off course, development cycles are shorter. Iterative/ Agile development is must have for a SaaS environment. This also means that as a product manager you have to be quick in translating requirements into use cases and prioritization of use cases with engineering groups. Brainstorming sessions tend to be quicker, verbal discussions will be more, documentation tasks would be less. Focus should be on quick iterations and greater customer response.

Theme: Requirement Analysis
SaaS environments cannot be customized easily. Thus, clear understanding of the customer’s problem & how your feature will add value is vital.

Theme: Customer feedback
Prepare to receive, interpret feedback from multiple direct sources. Blogs, Wikis, community portals etc. Product should have built in mechanism to provide feedback to the core groups. Product managers shouldn’t cut down on the direct communication with the customer. You also need to make sure that customer input should not be tailored in manner that fits predefined customer buckets.

Theme: Usability
This is obvious. However, in a SaaS environment you have to more vigilant/informed about the user’s needs, their tasks, their aspirations for the product, user scenarios, industry and user characteristics. You have to make your customers stick to the product. The cost of moving away is nothing. In addition, strong understanding of the web based technologies is essential. Easy, simple UI that gets the tasks is important. Clear crisp use cases hold the key.

Theme: No Training
Design and develop your product with a “no training” goal.

Theme: Communities
Focus on creating and leveraging communities.

Theme: Quality
Quality is important for on – premise and SaaS products. However, with a SaaS product you don’t have the luxury to exclude your sev3/sev4 bugs also. Every user would hit the issue in the SaaS model. Besides, you cannot control what the environment on the users machine and thus the chances of running into edgy issues is very high.

Theme: Innovation
“Me too” features is a recipe for disaster.