02 — SaaS Platforms
A SaaS product should be easy to use and difficult to outgrow.
Multi-tenant software becomes complicated quickly.
Plans become permissions. Customers become organizations. One workflow becomes ten.
Broaden engineers the underlying product architecture so growth adds capability instead of chaos.
Foundations before features become liabilities.
The parts of a SaaS product that decide whether year three is comfortable or expensive are almost never the parts on the roadmap in year one.
Capabilities
- Multi-tenancy
- Authentication
- Billing architecture
- Roles & permissions
- Product analytics
- Admin systems
Ideal when
- tenancy and permissions are starting to conflict
- billing logic is spreading across the codebase
- onboarding is the reason trials do not convert
- admin work is being done directly in the database
- usage data cannot answer product questions
Related reading
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Architecture decisions your users eventually feel
Database boundaries and caching strategy sound like implementation details until they become loading states and support tickets.
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Real-time UX is a state-management problem before it's a networking problem
Opening the socket takes an afternoon. Deciding what the screen means when messages arrive out of order takes the rest of the project.