The SaaSpocalypse: Why the Feature Factory Model Failed SaaS Companies

Salesforce, SAP, Atlassian… down 30 to 40% since January. The failure is called “feature factory”, not AI.

Here is what happened.

SaaS companies built a Product Operating Model optimised for « feature manufacturing ». And that choice led to several structural flaws:

First: Design teams were built for execution.
No one left in the room to reframe problems. No one empowered to bring an alternative vision and anticipate market redefinition.

Second: they believed “infinite improvement” exists.
The conviction that Nokia and Kodak-type events simply cannot happen in software. So their process was an infinite amount of sprints.

That made them vulnerable to any kind of disruption.

But here’s what is even more telling: OpenAI arrived as a signal in 2022. We are now in 2026. And nothing has really changed.

When conflicts of interest are built into the model itself, owning product and trade-offs, and when entire functions are locked out of strategic decisions, the organisation loses its ability to orchestrate differently. It becomes structurally incapable of pivoting.

Now SaaS companies, including scale-ups, are facing an industry-wide challenge:
— Rebuild their design team to own product vision and strategy.
— Rethink their Product Operating Model.

Saas is not dead, just the current way to approach the product.