Product Development Checklist for SaaS

Segment CRM and support tickets to identify firmographics, pains, and JTBD patterns. Use tags from sales calls to nail down the personas that convert and retain.

Use a repeatable script, record with tools like Grain or Zoom, and tag findings in Dovetail. Focus on current workflows, switching costs, and willingness to pay.

Audit competitor onboarding, feature gates, and pricing pages. Build battlecards that highlight your unique value metric and objection handling.

Choose a clear activation moment and a retention event relevant to your domain. Instrument both as product analytics events to monitor cohort stickiness.

Use RICE to rank ideas by reach, impact, confidence, and effort, then outline assumptions and risks on an opportunity canvas for stakeholder alignment.

Run the product market fit survey (how would you feel if you could no longer use the product) and NPS to set an initial benchmark for future iterations.

Decide between schema per tenant or shared with tenant_id, then enforce row level security in Postgres. Document isolation trade offs for future scale.

Generate an OpenAPI v1 contract, set deprecation timelines, and add a compatibility test suite. Communicate changes via changelog and email.

Adopt Segment with a naming convention and property dictionary. Send events to Amplitude or Mixpanel and validate with tracking plans.

Use LaunchDarkly or GrowthBook to gate features by environment, cohort, and plan. Keep flags short lived with owner, expiry, and kill switch.

Use trunk based development with GitHub Actions and ephemeral previews on Vercel or Netlify. Run tests and linting on every pull request.

Adopt OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing, send data to Datadog or New Relic, and enforce structured JSON logs with correlation IDs.

Support Google and Microsoft OAuth for growth and SAML SSO plus SCIM for enterprise. Validate domains and map groups to roles.

Use KMS for database and object storage encryption and enforce TLS 1.2 or higher. Rotate customer facing secrets on a fixed cadence.

Move API keys and credentials into Vault or a cloud secrets manager. Block secrets in code with pre commit hooks and CI scanners.

Define roles and permissions that map to plans and seats. Store entitlements in a service that gates API routes and UI elements.

Automate database and storage backups, then run monthly restore drills. Document recovery objectives and publish internal runbooks.

Track uptime, latency, and error rate budgets, publish a status page, and rotate on call with PagerDuty. Conduct blameless postmortems.

Implement data export and deletion APIs, set data retention windows, and maintain DPAs. Keep a data inventory and processing map.

Enable dependency, SAST, and DAST scanners like GitHub Advanced Security or Snyk. Break builds on critical CVEs and track remediation SLAs.

Choose subscriptions, usage based, or hybrid aligned to customer value. Validate with willingness to pay interviews and sensitivity analysis.

Use Stripe or Chargebee for plans, coupons, tax, and invoicing. Separate staging and production accounts and test proration flows.

Emit idempotent usage events with unique IDs, buffer and replay on failure, and reconcile usage in BigQuery or Snowflake against invoices.

Gate features by plan and seat counts with a central entitlement service. Provide short grace windows for payment failures to reduce churn.

Set clear usage caps or time limited trials with in app upgrade prompts. Expose paywalls only after demonstrating value to avoid frustration.

Enable sales to generate quotes and custom terms, handle net terms and purchase orders, and manage proration for upgrades and downgrades.

Create checklists, seed sample data, and provide one click integrations so users reach the aha moment within 10 minutes. Track time to value by cohort.

Use Appcues, Pendo, or Userpilot for tooltips, hotspots, and onboarding flows triggered by events. Personalize based on plan and role.

Publish a catalog for Slack, Zapier, and CRM connectors. Implement webhook retries with exponential backoff and idempotency keys.

Create searchable docs, add an AI assistant, and route to human agents in Intercom or Zendesk. Measure resolution time and deflection rate.

Add a cancellation flow that captures reasons, offers save options like pause, and triggers win back campaigns. Analyze churn by segment monthly.

Recruit design partners across segments, conduct quarterly roadmap reviews, and validate willingness to pay on new capabilities.

Use a single identity space for analytics and experiments to avoid bucketing drift. Track guardrail metrics like error rate and revenue per visitor.

Use k6 or Locust to load test login, billing, and key API endpoints. Set and enforce p95 latency budgets with alerts tied to SLOs.

Adopt Pact or similar tools to validate provider and consumer contracts. Block deploys that break integrators or partner apps.

Run Playwright or Cypress suites in CI for signup, onboarding, billing, and feature gates. Keep a fast smoke suite on every deploy.

Adopt canary or blue green releases with automated rollback on error budget burn. Gate risky features behind server side flags.

Tie releases to Jira epics, highlight customer facing changes, and syndicate via RSS and email. Tag changes by plan and persona.

Use axe core and manual keyboard testing to ensure focus management and contrast ratios. Include accessibility checks in CI.