Mistakes Companies Make Moving to XaaS

Great talking to Patric Palm, Founder and CEO of the Upsala, Sweden-based Favro. Favro makes and markets a planning app that enables teams to choose their own balance between power and simplicity making it suited to developers, marketers, and executives.

We are seeing the adoption of Agile business practices into many different industries and departments for anyone that deals with changing market conditions

There are three common mistakes Patric sees companies making as they choose and attempt to integrate any "as-a-Service" product or solution into their organization:

1. Big monolithic delivery with Agile delivery involves a short-term interation that doesn't kill you. "X-as-a-service" (XaaS) delivery means that each iteration must be awesome. You can't ship shit and expect to keep customers. XaaS changes how companies think about delivery value. Without the pressure to deliver a product as good as it can be, companies can get sloppy. However, with the constant pressure to deliver the minimum lovable product versus the minimum viable product companies need a systematic approach that can be automated to ensure what they're delivering meets, or exceeds, customer expectations.

2. Marketing has undergone a change in perspective from delivering "big bang" outbound campaigns to building on-going, long-term relationships with prospects and customers by providing information of value with inbound marketing. A different mindset is needed as we go from monolithic campaigns to a strategy of building an ongoing relationship.

3. While this is rarely a problem with start-ups where "Lean and Agile" are necessary for survival, we are seeing more traditional companies offering XaaS models whereby revenue is service-based versus product-based. Management must be Agile selling services and support that will exceed customer needs to ensure they are meeting service level agreements (SLAs).

What is critical for developers, marketers, and executives is to have a tool that integrates the tools that individual groups are using to eliminate the silos that are created by these tools, whereby there's transparency into what everyone is doing on behalf of the customer to ensure everyone in the company is aligned in providing the best customer experience and promotes collaboration between teams.

Every team is empowered to work the way they want with a single tool that can be integrated across the organization versus separate tools for separate teams. This results in autonomy plus alignment that live up to the security requirements of IT governance on par with what Google and Microsoft have achieved.