Author: Megha Poojari
The Enterprise SaaS business model relies on two important factors:
- The Product
- Customer Success
You can spend thousands of dollars on marketing, but if your product fails to provide solutions to your customers or has become stagnant due to lack of innovation and improvement, that is a recipe for customer churn and thus hurting your business.
There’s no denying the fact that both product and customer success are dependent on each other.
However, what we fail to realize is that product development is not just a one-stop process. A substantial amount of planning, re-planning, execution, testing, and feedback go into developing a product that not just caters to a universal problem but also is specific to the needs of each customer you have.
For example, your product caters to providing HRM solutions to your customer. Your product will help your customer curate their employee details, their backgrounds, compensation details, date of joining, log-in/log-out time captures, etc.
Here we can refer to the task as making sure all the features are in place for your customer to use. And the use case is “how” your customers want to use your product. Some customers would want it for data curation, some for payroll activities, etc.
Let us first understand what is a task and what is a use case.
What is a Task in a project?
In layman’s terms, a task is simply a chunk of activity that needs to be completed. This word is not only used in the software industry but also in other industries and organizations, such as banks, where everyone is assigned tasks like a teller, authorization of requests, account opening, and so on or in organizations where there are HRs, Marketing teams, Operations teams, etc, each working on different tasks.
The Collins Dictionary defines tasks as “activity or piece of work which you have to do, usually as part of a larger project.”
It is used in the enterprise software business to assign work items between team members. It can be a bundle of sub-tasks (for example, delivering an item will require the completion of sub-tasks) or a single work item by itself, like:
- Prerequisite Plannings
- Designing
- Coding
- Testing
- Feedback
It all depends on how much breakup is required to keep track of and complete a parent task.
What is a Use-Case?
A use case is an approach for finding, clarifying, and organizing system needs in systems analysis. A use case is a collection of conceivable sequences of interactions between systems and users in a specific setting, all of which are tied to a specific purpose. The technique generates a document that details all of a user’s steps in completing an activity.
Business analysts write use cases, which can be used at several stages of software development, including defining system requirements, validating design, testing software, and producing a framework for online help and user guides. A use case document can help the development team in identifying and understanding any issues during a transaction so that they can be resolved.
Simply explained, a use case is a description of all the ways a system can be “used” by an end-user. These “uses” are similar to system requests, and use cases describe how the system responds to such requests. In other words, use cases define how a system interacts with its users.
Why is this difference important?
Enterprise SaaS businesses are constantly struggling to achieve customer success, as well as to stay in business with a positive ARR. And this won’t be possible till you make the entire business approach customer and use case centric.
With all these pressures, how will the project manager ever know what needs more attention — is it the task or the use-case fulfillment?
According to PMI (Project Management Institute), most project managers struggle with the complexities of gathering ambiguous tasks and use cases that have no proper definition to them.
The decision to prioritize what is more important decides the future course of action in the product roadmap.
This, in turn, creates a fire-fighting situation wherein all the internal stakeholders like your onboarding team, project management team, and customer success teams end up investing the majority of their time in collecting, collating and analyzing data on tasks dependencies and use-case dependencies to push for development.
How should an Implementation Platform help with the decision?
Now that we have established that use case dependencies are more crucial than task dependencies and hence, you need to make sure that the right decision is made.
Implementation platforms should ideally put use cases at the front and center of the project. Sales to implementation hand-offs should be clearly captured by these platforms with the SOW requirements translated into use case-specific actions.
Having pre-defined use case-specific templates or playbooks can help with faster onboarding and project plan creation. This saves considerable time and bandwidth for implementation/project managers and helps them focus on customer-centric objectives.
Further, to accelerate time to value delivery, projects, use cases, and tasks should be logically connected within the implementation platforms, helping cross-functional teams to track and visualize the progress of use cases automatically using machine-controlled RAG statuses.
Finally, providing a holistic view of customers in a single place gives implementation teams full context of where they stand in terms of delivering use cases that were promised. This approach should help improve the overall customer experience and all the downstream customer success benefits post-go-live.
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