Company

For more than a decade, INSTEP has served executives at start-up, expansion stage and mature technology companies as well as investors. INSTEP is a boutique consulting firm that provides a wide range of strategic and tactical advisory services to drive SaaS new product development and market growth. INSTEP consists of a cadre of seasoned industry veterans who bring deep and diverse market, operational, product, domain, technical, and process expertise.

Working collaboratively with senior management, we use process, pattern and experience-driven models to create differentiated and sustainable product leadership positions in both emerging and established software and technology-based markets. We do so through a rigorous exploration of strategic dimensions of SaaS businesses including category articulation, market identification and selection, product management, new product development, partnerships, sales/channel strategy, business model innovations, operational efficiencies, customer success management, and SaaS transformation.

We bring extensive expertise and a proven approach to every project.

• SaaS business and product level strategy: INSTEP has created frameworks and methodologies that are “SaaS native” because of the fundamental differences in the SaaS business model.
• Strong global operating experiences: Our team members have played major operating executive roles in start-up, expansion stage and mature software and tech companies across the globe.
• Extensive technology expertise: Our team members are accomplished technologists who have successfully brought many products to market. They are also keenly aware of disruptive technologies and high-leverage open source and commercial-off-the-shelf technologies to be exploited by development organizations. They are widely recognized as industry experts having authored several hundred technical articles and books.
• Deep market and domain knowledge: Our team members bring deep market and domain expertise in terms of knowing the language, thought leaders, market landscapes, value chains, ecosystems, key players and standards across the major industries within tech.
• Process expertise: Our team members bring a vast array of knowledge and application of current and best practices in the strategic, tactical and operational dimensions of technology companies, including Lean and Agile methods and discovery-based development models.

• The SaaS era commands a product-centric view of the business and an ecosystem-centric view of the opportunity.
• Every project is an intentionally designed collaboration between key leaders within client companies and INSTEP staff.
• INSTEP projects are process-driven and model-based, leveraging the best available industry strategy and tactics methods and tools.
• INSTEP conclusions and recommendations are driven by the combination of our experiences, methods and tools that bring teams to informed decisions and actions on strategic and tactical issues.
• INSTEP staff are pragmatists who focus on operationally achievable results that are consistent with a client’s ability to execute. Further, we appreciate the importance of balancing customer success with shareholder success.
• INSTEP staff intentionally focus on equipping and capacity building of client staff via active learning, role and process clarification, mentoring, and knowledge transfer techniques.
• INSTEP staff realizes the importance of the client taking ownership of engagement results and does so via participative engagement models and employing active change management techniques.
• INSTEP staff are driven to achieve client outcomes and results.