I'm working on a report about the role of PM in an on demand setting (SaaS, PaaS, and all the other aaSes). As often happens in discussions about PM, the role is a window into many bigger issues. Since their responsibilities span both business and technology, product managers and product marketers find themselves in the middle of many fundamental questions for technology vendors, such as, How often should we deliver something new to our customers?

That question has two sides: (1) how often do customers want to receive something new, and (2) how often can the vendor deliver it. Both questions can be difficult to answer. Customers often want tech vendors to deliver value faster, but they also complain if the changes happen too fast. Vendors know that they could deliver new technology every time they do a build, but they also know that the entire company (sales, marketing, support, etc.) won't be able to keep up at that pace. There must be some golden mean between the pace of technology production and consumption, but what is it?

By shortening the distance between producers and consumers, on demand, and SaaS in particular, has made it easier to reach a meaningful answer. The on-premise model creates a very long value stream between the development team at the beginning of the technology adoption process, and the users at the very end. In fact, adoption is, at best, a blurry image on the distant horizon of the development team's field of vision. Since the success of a development team's work products depend on its adoption, lack of information about adoption is not an information gap, but a yawning chasm.