"Many teams keep costs on the sidelines - tracked, reviewed, and tolerated. But cost carries signals. It reflects decisions, trade-offs, priorities, and structure. Cost, when surfaced early and paired with product intent, reveals what the team values. And when teams begin to manage cost with the same curiosity they give to growth, the results last longer and reach further. I helped build this mindset within a SaaS team I was on during three business cycles."
"So, how did we build that connection? Every product delivers value. Every product consumes resources. These two forces shape the contour of your business: We started by tracking the cost to serve each cohort. Instead of leaving this critical information in a spreadsheet that we never used or only checking it during quarterly reviews, we built it as a real-time, living dashboard and posted it where decisions happen. We built this cost-to-serve dashboard from three systems already"
Cost carries signals that reflect decisions, trade-offs, priorities, and organizational structure. When surfaced early and paired with product intent, cost reveals what the team values and guides product trade-offs. Managing cost with the same curiosity applied to growth produces longer-lasting, broader results. A SaaS team built a cost-to-serve practice that tracked cohort-level cost in real time and posted the dashboard where decisions happen. The practice connected support incidents and inefficient user behaviors to dollar amounts, exposed runaway infrastructure costs, and identified customers causing disproportionate expense. Outcomes included an eight percent gross margin improvement, preserved product velocity, better user outcomes, and changed sales narratives. The work evolved from a dashboard into an operational playbook adaptable across teams.
Read at LogRocket Blog
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