Why You’ll Always End Up Building a Workflow Engine in B2B

Readers know that I have a lot of theories and frameworks about building and scaling B2B products, so when my former colleague from Box Jon Fan (now Head of Product at BioRender) and I decided to do a 60 Minute Stories episode, we immediately gravitated towards that topic. One aspect in particular that we wanted to drill into being the tendency of every (successful) SaaS product to slowly but surely become a workflow engine. I tried to articulate this once with a concept called Skip Step SaaS (and an infamous “barn diagram”). And Jon kicked off our conversation by highlighting that most B2B products are “replacing at least one step in a workflow”.