Agile transformation at a B2B SaaS company
A 150-person B2B SaaS company was shipping twice a year, each release carrying hundreds of defects. In six months, we reoriented the organization around quality: fewer than 10 defects per release, and a release every month.
A fast-growing B2B SaaS company faced several systemic challenges that kept it from executing the product vision set forth by its executive leadership team. In the year prior to engaging Natoma Consulting, it had shipped two releases of its software product to customers. These releases were six months apart, and each contained hundreds of defects.
While the company maintained a relatively steady client base, the lack of churn was mostly attributable to the absence of a ready competitor in the market, rather than to the stability or merits of the core product. Given that instability and the unpredictable schedule for new features and bug fixes, the company’s leadership realized that a change was required.
Once engaged, we quickly diagnosed the extent of the company’s challenges. A few problems stood out:
- There were no measurable, accountable, and enforceable quality standards for releasing the software.
- The Business, Services, and Technology organizations were not aligned on a product vision that served customers.
- There was no transparent, manageable product pipeline.
- No central group owned the processes and procedures, or continuously improved them, to guide how the software got built and delivered.
- The core supporting tools, including ticketing, help desk, and build software, were set up to get in the way rather than speed up development and delivery.
Faced with these challenges, we built a custom set of solutions, drawing on several frameworks and technical approaches, to reorient the company’s business and product focus toward the long-term stability of the software product, its quality. Here is what we did:
- Ran several agile frameworks and techniques in tandem: Scrum, feature-driven development (FDD), Kanban, Lean, extreme programming (XP), and continuous integration and delivery, ultimately settling into a LeSS implementation. Alongside them we used minimally viable KPIs to drive the product organization toward self-reinforcing reporting and action. There is no “one size fits all” approach to an agile transformation, so we took the pieces of each framework that fit the company’s particular use case.
- Established an agile governance board aligning Business, Services, and Technology organizations to achieve buy-in, execute, and control the process initiatives for all of the product teams.
- Established an agile process using continuous backlog refinement and product-roadmap alignment with customers and internal engineering teams to methodically build and manage a six-month-deep product pipeline, understanding that the further into the future a roadmap item was, the less certain the company could be that it would ship.
- Established and managed an agile project management office (“PMO”) via market hires and in-house talent development that defined and continuously improved upon the processes and procedures deemed a quality fit for the organization.
- Created highly automated custom workflows to support and enhance the newly established processes for multiple departments and verticals, customized Jira and Confluence extensively to support daily development, advocated for automated testing and its full integration into the software development life cycle (SDLC), and defined a triage process to incorporate customer help-desk support requests into product development.
The company was a medium-sized organization of roughly 150 people, and the results showed after only six months. Maintaining a focus on shortening the product-delivery cycle while increasing quality, we were able to achieve the following major results:
Before and after, six months
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Number of defects per release | 100+, minor to critical | <10, none higher than medium |
| Medium-or-lower defects fixed in the very next release | N/A | 100% |
| Product release cycle to customers | Once every 6–12 months | Once per month |
| Release notes | N/A | Every release |
| Continuous integration | N/A | Nightly builds |
| Early preview builds for customers | N/A | One month ahead of stable release |
By using multiple agile practices, techniques, and frameworks, we helped the company transform from an unpredictable organization into one focused on high-quality deliverables that met the needs of its customers and the marketplace. During this time, there was a significant decline in the number of calls to Customer Support regarding broken software and outages; instead, customers engaged in feature-development and roadmap-expectation conversations.
The company runs today as a successful SaaS business and has kept building on its agility. It has extended its DevOps tooling to deploy safely as soon as code is checked in, which shortens time to market for features and services.