business-methodologyI am a product manager at an SME, and I was looking into client facing issues and deliverables. While I was having conversation with my CEO, he said “More the better”.
The conversation was about how many clients should we provide a trial period of our SaaS project? And he replied “More the better” but he got 10 clients in a queue to roll out the product for a trial. Whereas I disagreed with this argument because I feel that we shouldn’t get so many trying our product out. I know the product is not ready to be rolled out to so many clients at once. Because it is still in Alpha stage, lots of bugs, features are yet to be fixed and built respectively.
How shall I convince my boss, that we should not pick so many clients for trial “now”?
As a product manager you are responsible for setting a deadline for an initial roll-out. You and your boss should already know when the initial roll-out is.
If there is no date set up, then set one up, together with the Dev team by figuring out what you need to fix and how long will it take. I suggest using a framework like Scrum.
EDIT: With that said, if you are not building software that is mission critical then 10 is a really low number.
Your boss is kind of right, but doing as many as you can is overkill. It’s best to work in batches.
When interviewing your clients, you’ll get redundant information. By the time you’ve done a half-dozen or so interviews, you’ll have a small list of problems that turned up repeatedly, and perhaps a few more that were brilliantly insightful. This is high signal to noise. Continue interviewing beyond that point, and the known points will continue to turn up, plus an occasional new one. This is low signal to noise.
As such, proceed in batches. Do a half dozen or so. (Maybe a few more the first time.) Basically stop when you start to feel you’re no longer learning much. Address the key problems that turned up. And then rinse and repeat with a new batch of interviewees.
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