One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned building opsworker.ai is that the hardest part of a SaaS startup isn’t the tech—it’s making sure you’re solving the right problem for the right people.

It’s easy to assume you know your customers’ pain, but until you sit down with them and measure it, you’re guessing. That’s why we’ve put a big focus on early adopters and structured feedback. Here’s how we’re approaching it:

1. Defining Clear Personas

When we started, it was tempting to say, “OpsWorker is for anyone with incidents.” But reality is different. We’ve narrowed down to three core personas:

  • Centralized SRE / Platform Engineers in SMB and scaleups, usually 2–10 people supporting 50–500 engineers.
  • Software Engineers in “You Build It, You Run It” orgs (large enterprises, running their own microservices).
  • VP Engineering / CTOs who feel the business pain of downtime and inefficiency.

Knowing exactly who we’re building for keeps our product decisions sharp.

2. Asking Persona-Specific Questions

I’ve learned that generic feedback is useless. Instead, we prepare questions tailored to each role:

  • SREs: “How much time do you lose chasing logs and metrics during incidents?”
  • Developers: “How often do infra tasks distract you from building features?”
  • VPs: “What does downtime cost you today, and how do you measure MTTR?”

The answers reveal where OpsWorker fits, and where it doesn’t.

3. Running Early Adopter POCs With Clear Metrics

Every early adopter we work with goes into a 6–8 week POC. We measure baselines (MTTR, incident hours, time lost to infra work), then track improvements.

For example, our goals are to show:

  • 40–50% faster incident resolution.
  • Reduction of 2–5% in engineers’ time wasted on infra tasks.
  • Encoded tribal knowledge → fewer repeat incidents.

Without numbers, you can’t prove value. With numbers, the story speaks for itself.

4. Capturing Feedback Continuously

I don’t wait until the end of a POC to ask “so, how was it?”. Instead, we do:

  • Weekly check-ins.
  • Quick in-Slack surveys right after OpsWorker responds to incidents.
  • Gap analysis: what we solved, what’s missing, and what could be next.

Feedback close to the action is always more useful.

5. Turning Results into a Business Case

At the end of each POC, I package results into a 1-page report for the decision makers:

  • Before vs. after numbers.
  • Example incidents solved.
  • Time saved.
  • Estimated $$ savings from downtime avoided.

It’s the evidence they need to push adoption internally.

Why I’m Sharing This

This isn’t just “our process”—it’s what I believe every SaaS founder needs to do. Personas, structured discovery, measurable early adopter POCs, continuous feedback, and a business case.

At OpsWorker.ai, it’s helping us cut through the noise, focus on what matters, and actually deliver value to the teams who need it.

👉 If you’re an SRE, DevOps leader, or VP of Engineering who wants to reduce MTTR and free your teams from firefighting, let’s connect. We’re onboarding early adopters now.

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Building OpsWorker