Platform consolidation: why we didn’t merge

The situation

I was at a Series A B2B SaaS company that sold software for turning customer success into proof for marketing and sales, like case studies, testimonials, and reviews. We’d acquired a second product that ran customer advocacy programs, where customers act as references, reviewers, and referrers. Same customers, two products, so everyone assumed we’d merge them. Engineering was already working out how, and a competitor was criticizing the two-platform setup in sales calls.

The merge question came up every week, and the decision kept getting pushed. At some point I decided to take it on. I led a six-week tiger team with the acquired product’s cofounder, our head of engineering, and a designer.

What I did

Everyone was asking how to merge, so I asked what customers actually needed. People kept saying “we need unified” and nobody could say what that meant, so I started there.

For six weeks I talked to customers of the evidence product, customers of the advocacy product, and the advocacy teams inside evidence customers. I also went through 39 features across both products to see where they overlapped and where a customer’s workflow broke.

The unified-platform vision held up. But that didn’t mean we had to consolidate the platforms or build a unified people data model. Customers needed to know where to go to create surveys, find referrals, and create content, and they needed the right data to move between the two apps. At bigger customers, two different people usually ran the two programs, so they didn’t need a merge.

It also wasn’t fully a product problem. Part of it was a sales problem. Our reps didn’t know how to talk about the two platforms, and they needed more training.

I recommended against consolidating the platforms and against building a unified people data model. Engineering’s minimum estimate for a merge was at least two to three months, with both roadmaps paused. The cofounders approved it and the rest of leadership was on board. Instead, we built data flows between the apps where they were needed, put both UIs on the same design system, and added a way to switch between the platforms from the main menu. I also trained sales and CS and gave them better talk tracks and demo flows.

Sales reps were the one exception. They needed data from both platforms at the same time, so I added a single view for them to the roadmap. I left before it was built, but the prototype got positive feedback in reviews.

What happened

Sales could explain how the two products worked together. By the customer conference, shortly before I left, customers weren’t bringing it up anymore, and the second product was selling as an upsell. That’s what I saw. I don’t have numbers because we hadn’t set up tracking yet.

What I don’t know

I don’t know whether a merge would have gone better, since we never built one. I left before we could measure the workstream’s core metrics.