The Main Thing: Selling Software - Back to the Future

Basecamp was one of the first to shift to the new SaaS (software as a service) model back in 2003. It was such a new concept at the time that their bank pushed back on recurring payments expecting a lot of chargebacks!

This year they have launched the first of their ONCE product range: a simplistic Slack / Teams competitor that you pay for once instead of every month.

And they've made over $250k in the first week!

Interestingly, a lot of people purchased it because you get to view the source and they want to learn how a company like Basecamp write high-quality code. Basecamp leaned into this and even offered a free tour of the code base for those who purchased.

The beauty of SaaS is that sweet recurring revenue but it also comes with hosting and infrastructure overhead, support challenges, account management and more.

While it isn't for everyone it is interesting to see some variation in the market. 
Rory

This Weeks Updates

Enabling the Team

Enhancing Employee Experience through UX by Dr Maria Panagiotidi
Maria shares how you can leverage user research and human-centered principles to create thriving workplaces.

The Continuous Product Improvement Cycle by Jeff Patton
Jeff explores why products, especially tech ones, are expected to improve rapidly, delving into the four critical aspects of the software development process.

Product Direction

How to Turn Company OKRs into Product OKRs by Tim Herbig
Discover why, if teams do not influence your metrics, you can either expand your sphere of influence or scale down the Key Result.

Metrics That Cannot Even Be Measured In Retrospect by Jason Cohen
Some of the most enticing, important metrics are impossible to measure, even after the fact. Here's how to identify and avoid this trap.

Continuous Discovery

Why UX is Critical to Digital Marketing by Alan K'necht
Marketing involves research, empathy towards customer issues, and effective communication of solutions, mirroring a similar role within product teams.

How to Lead Effective UX Roadmap Planning Discussions by Rebecca Granat Shapiro
7 questions to ask and a spreadsheet template you can use during UX roadmap planning to get your partners and team on the same page.

Continuous Design

Five Future Roles for Designers by Jorge Arango
Jorge engages in crystal ball gazing to predict how the role of design will evolve as AI assumes more low-level tasks.

Why Feature Centricity is Harming Your Product by Andy Budd
The vast majority of teams focus on building features. However, to improve outcomes, there needs to be a shift in the teams' focus.

Continuous Delivery

Test-Driven Development As Prompt Engineering by David Luhr
As AI code generator tools like GitHub Copilot gain adoption, Test-Driven Development (TDD) becomes even more essential and a key differentiator for developers.

The Good, The Bad, The Web Components by Zach Leatherman
Web Components are gaining popularity because they are framework-agnostic. Zach shares the current status of Web Components and where they are going.

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The job of the Week

Frontend Developer
🏬 Splunk
📌 Hybrid Remote, Krakow, Poland

About Splunk
Founded in 2003, Splunk Inc. is a leader in real-time operational intelligence, offering software for big data analysis. Its main products, including Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud, enable organizations to analyze machine-generated data for improved operations, cybersecurity, and customer experience.

See role details here

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question was: What metric has the biggest impact on your bonus?

Again there was a wide range of answers for what people consider their most important KPI. To be honest this hasn't been my direct experience, where time and cost seem to trump other metrics when it comes down to the crunch.

I guess the main thing to take away is that there is a lot of variability in how people are managing delivery. Now I just need the Accelerate team to do a multi-year statistical analysis on top performers to see which metrics get the best results!