Building SaaS products with customers, not just for them
Image: Klaveness Digital Product Team working together.
Product development in SaaS often follows a familiar recipe: build and release fast, respond to customer requests – rinse and repeat. At Klaveness Digital, that approach is taking a different direction. As a company firmly rooted in shipping, the product team is challenging both themselves and the industry to think beyond the obvious.
“We’re not just a tech start-up dabbling in shipping,” says Sophie Knudtzon, Head of Product.
“Our products are built from a long history in the industry and shaped by every day maritime challenges that our own organization faces. That’s what sets us apart.”
Balancing customer needs against “the build trap”
Klaveness Digital’s customer relationships run deep, with some of the longstanding customers of the Klaveness Group serving as strong collaborators in shaping the company’s solutions. This creates fast feedback loops and ensures products stay anchored in real operational challenges.
The proximity, however, comes with trade-offs. When customer requests don’t align with long-term product vision, hard choices follow. “Sometimes we have to let our best customers down,” Knudtzon explains. It’s the balance between short-term gain vs long-term value and a reminder to avoid “the build trap”, i.e., where teams deliver custom features ‘to order’ without assessing if they’re solving the bigger issues.
By involving customers in development while keeping sight of broader market needs, the team works to balance relevance with scalability.
Challenging assumptions
Deep industry knowledge is one of Klaveness Digital’s strengths, but it also comes with the risk of assuming experience equals truth. To counter this, the product team pushes itself to test and stretch its views.
“We need to actively remind ourselves to ‘get out of the building’,” says Knudtzon. “Because we come from the industry and share an office with Klaveness Dry Bulk and Klaveness Combination Carriers, it’s easy to think we already know how things work. But we have to see how a wider set of customers use our tools — not just our closest customers and colleagues.”
This mindset drives broader user testing and ensures the products are designed for the industry as a whole, not just for one segment.
CargoValue 2.0
The evolution of Klaveness Digital’s flagship platform, CargoValue, illustrates this shift. What began as a shipping-focused platform has expanded upstream, with inventory as the new focal point.
“Everything begins with inventory,” Knudtzon notes. “It dictates the rest of the supply chain. By focusing there, we can help customers make better decisions earlier. And this was unfamiliar territory for us as a shipping company.”
The updated platform brings scenario analysis, greater interface flexibility, and a foundation that opens doors beyond maritime. For a company rooted in shipping, venturing into broader supply chain terrain may feel alien, but necessary for growth.
AI is another frontier Knudtzon touches on. Rather than just automating tasks, the team is exploring optimization with algorithms that not only identify alternatives, but also recommend the best ones. The aim is to move from efficiency gains to smarter decision-making that directly improves outcomes.
Multiple products, shared learning
Klaveness Digital is managing several products at different stages of maturity. Pre-Vetting, a chartering decision-support tool first built for internal use, is scaling externally — and this raises questions about how internal needs diverge from market demands. Emissions, designed to help charterers and cargo owners measure maritime carbon footprints, is in a similar phase.
What ties them together is a deliberate sharing of insights. Lessons from one product inform the next, with the team leveraging its network to accelerate access to new test cases. The result is an innovation funnel where ideas, learnings, and feedback flow across the portfolio.
Building for the long term
Klaveness Digital’s approach shows that successful software development in shipping is not just about code or features. It’s about staying close to the industry while daring to step outside familiar waters. It’s about saying no when needed and about challenging assumptions, both own and industry-wide, to ensure the right problems are solved. As Knudtzon puts it: “We grow as the industry grows. But we also need to look outside for inspiration. That’s the only way to stay relevant.”
We are hiring
Keen to see for yourself? With great ambitions, we need great people and Klaveness Digital is always looking for new talent to join the team. Reach out to learn more about what we do and what positions we offer.