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”.
Products are workflows after all. The example Jon provides to illustrate this is one from his time at Benchling where they built “Evernote for scientists”. One really insightful takeaway I got from Jon was that when moving a workflow from analog to digital, you can unlock new capabilities by structuring and automating the workflow in ways that weren’t possible before.
Beyond the value for end users, you can also provide the orchestrators and administrators of the workflow visibility in a more unified manner - a “single pane of glass” as it were. For any product that is able to become the definitive solution to a workflow problem, you are now set up to be the center of a larger ecosystem where partners orient around your view of the workflow.
We also got a great question from the audience on when, where, and how to expand a product’s workflow scope. In this clip I share some heuristics on signals to look for as a starting point:
Jon also tied all this product thinking around workflow simplification to the parallel concern from GTM on increasing the surface to sell to and the larger business goal of addressable market expansion.
In our hour together, Jon and I also dive into a variety of other aspects to this topic, including:
learning from power users and how it can be a double edged sword
navigating from a single use case to a broader workflow engine
when and how to expand your workflow through build / buy / partner
