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4 Tips to Make a Successful Career in SaaS Management

Shivam Verma

2nd February, 2023

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The new age organizations utilize various SaaS applications for business growth. These SaaS tools are quickly becoming a staple for most companies for multiple tasks due to their automation capabilities, affordable rates, easy-to-use features, and much more.

Thus, the question arises who is responsible for keeping an eye on this? Of course, the answer can be the IT professional who wants to move up in their field. 

In this guide, you’ll learn how SaaS management can help you grow your IT career.

The demand for SaaS has escalated since the pandemic as it simplified off-site collaboration and streamlined workflows. As a result, almost all the departments in an organization rely on SaaS. This results in a large stack of apps, and the number keeps growing with various requirements. 

The usage of SaaS is undeniably more significant for larger enterprises. This results in an escalation in the number of tools in the company leading to a manually unmanageable state. This leads to numerous risks and unexpected issues and increases the workload for the IT units. Thus, SaaS management has become a significant role and the need of the hour.

Furthermore, expanding purchasing power to employees has made SaaS management more critical. Since anyone with a company credit card can buy a SaaS solution, there is no way to tell if a SaaS app was purchased through the procurement process or “shadow IT.” Shadow IT is when a company makes purchases that are not aligned with its procurement policy.

Organizations need to use the right SaaS management practices to stop such practices and the security risks that come with them. Currently, most SaaS management deals with privacy policies, compliance, cost, budget, spending, Etc. 

These outdated processes take substantial time and bring potential risks and errors. Therefore, initiating SaaS management in such organizations can be considered as identifying and solving problems. 

This article discusses how you can make a successful IT career with valuable SaaS management practices.

Tips for Thriving in a SaaS Management (or SaaSOps) Career

The SaaS practices that were common among IT professionals five years ago are no longer considered standard. The IT department handles every new SaaS-related process or request. Therefore understanding the value of SaaS management is crucial for advancing an IT career.

1. Stay Updated with new SaaS technologies

The most important thing is understanding how technology affects every part of business and how it can be used to its fullest potential. In fact, organizations that are open to new ideas to set the standards for the future. 

But, according to Forrester data, only 21% of organizations think they’ve reached the digital transformation goals. This could be because organizations are slow in adopting mobile-first enterprise technologies or don’t engage with their audiences (employees, customers, prospects, partners, and talent).

But even though these problems are worsening, many businesses don’t have the support and logistics to make decisions about cloud-based software or move towards SaaS management practices that work. This is because they are not updated with the current SaaS technology practices.

The methods used by IT managers two decades ago, or even five years ago, are no longer the norm. While in the past, the IT department handled every new process or request. 

Shadow IT has become more familiar with the rise of SaaS management administration. So, it would be best if you stay updated with the current SaaS management practices and tools to overcome such challenges and make a successful career in SaaS management.

2. Develop strategic & analytical thinking skills

While managing SaaS tools in an organization, it is necessary to develop strategic and analytics thinking. This helps the individual see how applications being considered for the organization will profit the business and streamline workflows. This requires the aspirant to have the thorough market knowledge to find software that aligns with the business needs. 

The strategical skill must also involve understanding the end user’s needs as the SaaS tools used in the organization must also meet customer and other departments’ demands. A skilled SaaS manager understands the business concepts that cover all areas, including internal and external user needs. 

With analytical thinking, the individual can develop better revenue models, increase ROI, solve problems, and more. Resolving issues and understanding the problems that the business is facing is a highly significant part of this role. The skilled manager gets involved with the product development team to provide innovative suggestions and stay updated with new technology trends to drive customer satisfaction. Additionally, they communicate these problems with the stakeholders and other superiors to find solutions immediately. 

3. Enhance product Features and prioritization Skills

To succeed as a SaaS manager, you need to know the SaaS product inside and out. You must be familiar with the features and benefits of the product and how they address the need of the target audience. You’ll have to share the findings with relevant internal and external parties. Here are some suggestions for learning more about the item:

• Take your time learning about the product’s various features and capabilities.

• Get a feel for the product’s intended use case and the difficulties its intended users attempt to address.

• Have conversations with buyers to learn how well the product serves their requirements.

• Consider your customers’ comments and ideas to improve the product.

• Keep abreast of any product updates or modifications.

• Recognize who your competitors are and how your product stacks up against the market.

Take advantage of all you’ve learned here to develop marketing and sales materials that effectively communicate your product’s value to potential customers.

Proper SaaS management needs you to know how to prioritize Product features. Decisions must be made on which features to prioritize and which to shelve. First, establish what you consider to be the product’s most crucial features. Next, find out what functions are most valued by your target audience and prioritize them. Finally, use the information to ascertain which factors most significantly affect the achievement of your business objectives. 

4. Keep an eye out for new ways to handle SaaS Administration

As companies still use several manual ways for tracking and segregation of tools, getting full transparency of all the SaaS utilized in the organization becomes challenging. The IT chiefs who are fully aware of the number of applications in the stack and the cluster they create, along with the risks they brew, understand the need for innovative solutions to manage these tools.  

The IT leaders usually seek out effective SaaS managers who are capable of the following:

• They can develop and implement plans for calculating and measuring the total cost of ownership for all the SaaS tools.

• They track and assess contracts, the details in these contracts, and offer forms of the products. 

• They support the application stakeholders to go in for the contract negotiations only after detailed information with reliable data. 

There are other skills that the SaaS manager requires to have to be eligible for this role, so IT and other units can rely on them. One of them is having a skill set that comprises data and analytics. 

It is crucial for the individuals in this role to know how to set and track key performance indicators, which include customer conversion rate, user churn, etc. 

This role requires the manager to identify, prioritize and communicate the metric strategy for the business goals and objectives. To master this skill set, a lot of practice and training is required as it is not only about acquiring solutions but also about the knowledge of how things work. 

A lot of studying and self-evaluation is included, along with analytical thinking to prepare for expanding this expertise.

Compliance is another field that professionals will have to get used to and learn to work with. It is similar to security in some ways. Since SaaS puts the offering right in front of the business or end-user, there are standards for data privacy and information security that must be followed. 

These standards could be industry-specific and fully fleshed out with a proper framework, or they could be other standards with the same level of detail. In any case, it’s up to the developers to know how to work within these rules and ensure that working with a vendor doesn’t put them at risk of not following the rules.

About the author

Shivam Verma

Shivam is a Product Manager at Zluri who is equipped with experience in scaling both B2B and B2C products. He was previously a founder at Autumn and has also done Product roles at Arrow. He’s a customer-centric product enthusiast with a tech inclination. He spends his off hours cycling, swimming or making new tunes in his guitar or piano.