Enterprise SaaS Truisms, Revisited

The Beliefs that AI Broke

A few years back I published a list of enterprise SaaS truisms - operating principles I believed to be commonplace wisdom about B2B product development and distribution. Nuggets like “admin is not a JTBD”, “usage begets sprawl”, and “change management is a barrier” that were grounded in years of pattern-matching across products I’d built, advised, and used, and the response from readers suggested they resonated pretty broadly.

Recently I’ve been stress-testing this playbook against an AI-native world. And what I found is that several of these truisms are either flipping entirely, getting dramatically amplified, or quietly becoming irrelevant. Some of the beliefs still hold because the underlying organizational behavior they describe hasn’t changed. But others are colliding with something that’s changing the game faster than most teams are updating their approach - and I see lot of product teams applying early 2010s thinking thinking to a late 2020s market.

So consider this a follow-up. …