u/ProperLion49

hello founders, we have 5 contractors who've been with us for 2+ years and the call gets harder every time i look at it.

the easy story is convert all of them and sleep at night, except the cost delta between contractor and EOR'd employee in their countries (poland, portugal, brazil, mexico, india) ranges from a 30% bump to almost double depending on benefits stack and country tax weirdness.

For the 2 European ones who are 4 days/week with us, the case is obvious, you'd reclassify them in court right now if anyone asked.

But for the LATAM and india ones who are project-based and renewing contracts on the day, the case is less clear, except for the fact that contractor laws in all 3 of those countries got tighter this year.

what im wrestling with is that converting just the european contractors sends a mixed signal to the others, who will notice we paid for compliance for the europeans and not for them. I've seen at least one founder write about handling this by converting everyone to EOR in the same week, which is honest but also a 6-figure annual cost increase i wasn’t budgeting for.

Our current plan is convert the 2 european contractors this quarter, leave the other 3 on a watching review through end of year, and revisit when one of them crosses the next threshold.

don’t love it as a system but its the version of the answer i can defend at a board meeting if pressed.

Thoughts?

doing quarterly churn analysis at a b2b SaaS and the easy part is the rate itself.

mapping each churned account back to a specific product gap is where it falls apart, because the why doesn’t sit in one data source.

Right now i pull CSAT scores, exit interview notes from CS, support tickets from the period the account was struggling, and CRM notes from the renewal conversations, and I sit with all of it on a Friday afternoon trying to find the pattern.

it takes a whole quarter and by the time the picture is clear, the next quarter's churn cohort is already 2 weeks in.

Specifically wondering whether anyone has a clean way to make churn-to-product-gap mapping a continuous signal rather than a quarterly retro. is the play to keep customer feedback flowing into themed buckets that already exist in the roadmap, so by the time an account churns the why is already mapped?

if youve got this part of the analytics workflow figured out at a research-heavy b2b SaaS, what's your process for that?

thank you

Productboard's AI-weighted prioritization is live and the suggestion engine ranks incoming requests by business impact factors like deal size, segment and churn risk, on top of raw frequency.

our PM team is split on whether to add it to our stack and the case for and against has gotten tangled.

we run Gong for the calls, BuildBetter for synthesis, Linear for the eng tickets, and Notion for strategy docs, and the prioritization side is where we get stuck.

We currently weight requests in a Linear-attached scoring rubric that our head of product owns, and the rubric inputs (deal size, segment, churn) come from Salesforce manually. Productboard's new prioritization promises to automate that weighting using CRM data and conversation-level severity signals.

the split is roughly eve with half the team thinking AI-weighted priority is going to surface deals our manual rubric is missing, while the other half thinks the rubric is the only thing preventing loudest-customer bias from running the roadmap.

it feels unresolvable without seeing real before-and-after data, and what i'd find most useful is hearing from teams that had a working manual rubric and turned this on anyway, because that's the closest comparison to where we sit right now.