Technology product management plays a central and pivotal role in the success of any technology-as-a-service (XaaS) business. The effectiveness, the influence, and the cross-departmental collaborations are a function of how this team is designed and where in the organization it reports. Given this importance, TSIA surveyed product management organizational practices in the XaaS Product Management Spring 2018 Survey, and then further explored the topic in its annual Cross-Organizational Survey.
The findings, combined with pacesetter company case studies, reveal notable evolutions in operational practices that reflect the industry shift to XaaS business models, including:
- Organizing product management as a centralized function, reporting to the CEO or business unit general manager, is a majority practice. Centralization is most prevalent in companies with XaaS offerings.
- Company size impacts how product management aligns with the adjacent functions of product engineering and product marketing.
- The rise of service revenues is forcing new alignments between service and product management organizations.
Companies need to assess and adapt their product management organizational structures and organizational alignments to better support the growth of new XaaS revenue streams. These new structures must be optimized for customer influence on product design, simplification of the user experience, and cost-effectiveness of product adoption strategies. The last section of this paper provides five specific recommendations product leaders can pursue to optimize their organizations to manage profitable XaaS offers.