After a quick sanity check to confirm the numbers were good, let’s review what some of these other orgs look like. Your email address will not be published. Waterfall frameworks, using massive upfront planning, leave no room for mistakes or major obstacles. As a result, inbound marketing strategies that create a compounding interest effect are very popular with SaaS startups. Amazon’s famous “two pizza rule” stipulates 3-10 people in a team. We use cookies to provide and improve our services. In most cases, product development teams should be cross-functional because it enables you to better utilize skills from across departments, rather than forcing teams to transfer work between teams. For this reason, you should consider designing teams around responsibilities. Last month, we reviewed two SaaS companies, HubSpot and InsightSquared, and contrasted how employees are distributed by department at their Series C stage.Briefly, we found that Sales roles represent 30-40% of company headcount, and that Services scales quickly behind Sales to deliver on boarding, customer support, and other needs to make sure new customers are well served. The sales ops team must work with marketing ops to integrate with demand generating functions to meet goals and forecasts. Building a team structure for your product development will likely involve trial and error, and likely, several different types of teams. Everyone takes on multiple roles and does what’s needed to get things done. Yet, enterprise businesses must deal with managing a large number of sales processes and team members. Product Development Team Structure for SaaS Organizations Vision to Value Product Development Team Structure for SaaS Organizations. If the module changes or becomes obsolete, the team purpose doesn’t have to change to assign the team to something else. In our survey, seven SaaS companies with fewer than 50 employees shared their breakdowns. April 14, 2020 April 14, 2020; by ... for support, operations maintenance, and day-to-day work that would detract from team productivity. Vision to Value Framework Copyright © 2020 Luis Gomes de Abreu All rights reserved. TeamC, a small innovation team, is composed of 3 developers, and a product owner who is also a quality engineer. It’s faster, more efficient, and allows your team to be as innovative as necessary to solve presented problems. Why is this a good thing? This changes dramatically at companies that have found a scalable solution. This article includes basic information for structuring product dev teams and offers some tips and advice from the book, Vision to Value. Giving teams full ownership of a module or feature allows them to work on that feature at their own pace, with no bottlenecks, and no delays except where features or models interact with other parts of the application. I received this proposed structure just as the company was raising capital and hiring staff to scale its business and attack multiple industry verticals at once. In our set, the Services org averages 2.5 people before 50 employees, and 17.5 after 50. At Nmbrs, we use a variation of the Spotify Model. (4) Strategy and planning As an executive, the sales ops leader must have big-picture plans regarding incentive plan design and administration , territory definition**, growth planning, and renewals. Choosing Roles – Team roles should be chosen based on the team purpose, so that individual skill sets are aligned with those goals. For instance, companies such as Novartis and the EMC Corporation hire and retain thousands of sales … B2B SaaS Org Chart: ~25 FTE. Because they haven’t found a process for selling the software in a repeatable fashion, the marketing and sales engine hasn’t begun to grow up. Developer – Most teams need at least 2-4. The IT Leader’s Checklist for SaaS Operations 4 Build your SaaSOps team structure with: One SaaSOps professional for about every 50–150 users. Customer success is critical for scaling organizations. In a survey from that post, we collected data on 13 more SaaS organizations ranging from 13 to 244 employees, and their headcount breakdown by department. For example, for companies founded earlier in the evolution of cloud computing, we might find that IT / Operations accounts for a much larger segment of the company, until many office IT functions were outsourced to the products of other companies. Team Lead and/or Manager: Focuses on people management. Of course, Agile comes in many “flavors” and you’re free to choose the model you want. Why? Notify me of follow-up comments by email. TeamZ comprises a product owner, scrum master, 4 developers, quality assurance, and a third-line customer support agent, whose primary responsibility lies in customer support. This can result in difficulty as that goal or purpose is completed or changed. The team receives external support from a scrum master serving other teams with the same business function. When you first launch, chances are, roles and teams are poorly defined, if at all. If you determine something can’t be built 5 months into the process, everything must be scrapped and you have to start over. However, most organizations greatly benefit from cross-functional teams capable of owning features and modules, and capable of working on and achieving goals with minimal management and minimal dependencies on other teams. Learn how to understand your capacity needs, the amount of resources you need to hit your goals, and develop the right sales ops team structure. Briefly, we found that Sales roles represent 30-40% of company headcount, and that Services scales quickly behind Sales to deliver on boarding, customer support, and other needs to make sure new customers are well served. What should one of these teams look like? Building world-class SaaS customer support. The marketing group should probably scale past one or two people to unlock more programs–all of the companies in our set had reached at least a four person team. These cross-functional groups allow Spotify to create small, highly autonomous squads that remain connected to others across the organization. Your best option is to research your options and choose a model that best-suits your organization. The marketing team varies wildly, from 1 person to 15 in some orgs at this size. Luis Gomes de Abreu is a tech entrepreneur, author, and CTO. Providing great customer support keeps those customers happy, and it helps your business grow.