The Problem
In a multi-product SaaS company, everyone is making investment decisions with different assumptions. The board thinks in top-level company metrics. Product management thinks in features. Engineering thinks in capacity. Sales thinks in pipeline. When those perspectives don’t connect, the company overinvests in declining products, underinvests in growth ones, and can’t explain why the numbers aren’t moving.
When hard decisions come, like workforce reductions or product sunsetting, there’s no shared rationale. It feels like financial pressure from investors rather than a coherent strategy.
The Framework
The model classifies each product by lifecycle stage and defines what every function should be doing differently at each stage. Paired with a cross-functional team model organized around each product, it creates an operating rhythm where the board gets product-level financial visibility they never had before, and the teams experience it as product strategy and ownership, not financial pressure.
At the first company, cross-functional teams delivered quarterly performance readouts to senior leadership together: always on the same page, in it together, rather than the typical finger-pointing across functions. At the second company, the framework gave the leadership team a structured way to communicate transformation decisions, including workforce reductions, as product lifecycle strategy that was understandable from the board to the engineers.
Outcomes
- Deployed across two PE-backed SaaS companies: operating role and advisory role
- Governed investment decisions across 4 product lines and 16 products at the first company
- Cross-functional teams delivered quarterly readouts together, eliminating inter-functional finger-pointing
- Provided communication framework for workforce reductions and product sunsetting at both companies
- Company recorded first profitable month under PE ownership during the advisory engagement
- CEO from the first company brought me in at the second because they had seen the model work
Most multi-product SaaS companies lack a shared framework for portfolio decisions. To the board, this model looks like financial governance. To the people, it looks like product strategy. That’s the point.