From Application to Must-Have Platform: Strategies and Lessons from Snow Software
Unexpected changes can be frustrating and disorienting – but they also provide the perfect opportunity to embrace the unexpected. A strong product vision is essential for guiding your team’s efforts and keeping everyone aligned towards a common goal. But what happens when the market shifts or customer needs change? How do you know when to stay the course and when to adapt your plans?
As the market for software products continues to evolve at breakneck speed, companies must stay agile and adaptable in order to stay ahead of the curve. This is a lesson that Becky Trevino, Executive Vice President of Product at Snow Software, knows all too well. In the last four years, Snow transformed from the leading application for Software Asset Management (SAM) to a powerful platform for Technology Intelligence. Snow defines Technology Intelligence as the ability to understand and manage all of your technology, helping organizations gain actionable insights to anticipate and react quickly to evolving market trends and business requirements. Snow delivers Technology Intelligence by empowering customers to see all of their software and cloud services in one place to optimize costs, reduce risk, and make better business decisions.. But as Trevino explains, the journey from application to platform has not been without its challenges.
We sat down with Trevino to learn more insights on how to navigate market shifts, take calculated risks, and stay true to a product vision.
Keep your vision stable (but not static)
Snow found initial growth by focusing on one specific category: Software Asset Management. “We led the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Software Asset Management, but we began to see changing dynamics in SAM as cloud adoption increased,” explains Trevino.
We were seeing more CIOs migrating their traditional data centers to the cloud, buying more SaaS applications versus on-premises software, and leveraging newly available cloud services. The good news for Snow? They already offered a flexible data set built around asset discovery, inventory management, and normalization that could be expanded to address the new challenges CIOs were having managing SaaS sprawl and rising cloud infrastructure costs.
The key to making the transition stick, according to Trevino, is to balance resources between stable, mature products and new bets. “If you have an existing market, how far as a product team do you want to go? Usually it’s a safer route to go to adjacent markets, but if you want to reach totally new markets, you really have to think about acquisitions.”
Three key factors Trevino uses when assessing new product bets:
- Is product revenue continuing to grow?
- Is there still a strong total addressable market that we haven’t addressed yet? Where are our customers spending more time?
- Are our win-loss rates stable? Where is it easier for us to win deals?
To speed up their transition to managing a more broad set of technologies, Snow acquired cloud management firm Embotics in 2019, cementing cloud management as a core bet in their product strategy. Such an acquisition wouldn’t have made sense if Snow had remained solely focused on software asset management, but Trevino credits it as a necessary step along the path to reaching their expanded vision for the product and the company. Further solidifying their cloud strategy, Snow recently launched a new version of its SaaS Management Platform to give IT leaders better control of their SaaS portfolio to open up to a new set of customers.
TAKEAWAY: Your product vision needn’t remain static. Customer needs, technologies, and business goals all change over time, and you should ensure your vision expands to encompass those needs and keep the organization aligned.
Let your positioning guide your product strategy
Of course, making such a huge leap from a single-product company to a multi-product company is no cakewalk, even with Snow’s expertise. In this scenario you must expand your positioning to communicate the new value you provide while not alienating your core audience.
“When you have just one product, you have one identity about what you do,” Trevino shares. “But when you add an entirely new product line – not simply an add-on product for your existing persona– it is essential to be aligned with the go-to-market side of your company.”
“The vision and strategy have to match the current reality of what’s selling. You can have the nicest vision and strategy, but if somehow that doesn't align well with what's selling in the market, you’ll struggle to meet your goals.”
Trevino credits the team’s community-focused approach to thought leadership as helping to close the knowledge gap – along with a healthy dose of creative positioning. In mid-2019, Snow published a blog post titled “Technology Intelligence is the Future of Software Asset Management”, giving their newfound product vision a name and making it simple for customers and prospects to digest. Another exercise Trevino’s team instituted was a set of artifacts dubbed “Speaking Snow-ish”. “Snow-ish was a learning module that taught new employees how to speak Snow-ish – essentially, the language of Technology Intelligence.” By grounding new employees in the product vision from the very beginning, Snow was able to quickly establish understanding – and alignment – around their new product vision.
TAKEAWAY: Don’t neglect positioning when building alignment around your product strategy, both internally and externally. Positioning connects your overarching company and product strategy with tactical sales, marketing, and service delivery – everything should stem from it and reinforce it. “I don’t know that enough product leaders spend enough time thinking about [positioning and go-to-market]”, Trevino says.
Evangelize your vision across the organization
Of course, Snow’s customers weren’t the only people affected by the transition. Everyone from product and engineering to sales and support need to understand how the transition would affect not only the customers and prospects they work with, but also their day-to-day work.
“Snow is a Swedish company. The Swedes have this term called the red thread,” which Trevino explains as the connective tissue between the work they do and how it helps influence the direction of their team and the company as a whole. If individual contributors don’t have a clear grasp on their red thread, the entire product organization grinds to a halt.
Building that red thread across the organization starts with establishing clear goals and objectives. The leadership team at Snow has established four company-wide priorities, ranked by importance to align cross-functionally. Snow priorities are then shared everywhere from Jira to the annual Snow company kickoff, Unleashed. “This year we’ve done the strongest job sharing how our top priorities get us closer to our vision,” Trevino shares. “At every Unleashed our CEO talks about how we’re progressing against our [Technology Intelligence] vision,” Trevino explains. “Where are we? What are the big company priorities? Everywhere they [product and engineering] turn, they’re seeing the four priorities.”
As a product leader, Trevino then works with the CTO to translate those priorities into joint product and engineering objectives. Each of Trevino’s direct reports owns an objective, allowing their team to easily tie their individual initiatives to the same set of key results. “That way, everyone can stay on the same page, and while our OKRs might look slightly different, we’re all working towards the same annual goals.”
“While our OKRs might look slightly different, we’re all working towards the same annual goals.”
TAKEAWAY: There’s no shortcut to building alignment and the key to gaining alignment internally is to tie your vision to customer and market needs. “When starting out in Product Management, PMs can sometimes feel apprehensive about talking to customers,” Trevino says. “If I’m the leader of Product and I don’t show by example that [customer feedback] is important to me, then why should they take it seriously? I take a lot of accountability and ownership over that, and my team should as well.” Put in the effort to build your red thread and ensure everyone in the organization understands how their work contributes, and you’ll quickly see dividends.
Learning to love the journey
Snow’s journey from application to platform is far from over – but Trevino knows the path the Product team chooses, and the lessons they learn along the way, are just as crucial a part of Snow’s product strategy as the destination. Just like a traveler on a vacation, it’s not always about the destination, but the lessons learned and experiences gained along the way.
What has enabled Trevino and her team to make this progress is a commitment to staying focused on customer needs and market trends, while also being willing to take calculated risks and learn from their mistakes. By keeping a finger on the pulse of the market, taking calculated risks, and maintaining a strong sense of purpose, product teams can navigate the ever-changing landscape of product strategy and emerge stronger than ever.
“We’re still on our journey to becoming a platform for Technology Intelligence,” she says. “But we’re making progress every day.”
Want to hear more from product leaders like Trevino? Read our previous post in this series, The Amplitude Journey: How Engineering, Sales, and Persistence Built a Product Analytics Powerhouse.
