Outsourced product development for a startup — Part 1: Making the sandwich
As I walked into home late that evening, my wife could see that I was distressed. She asked me soothingly whether I would like a sandwich. Sure will, I replied, distracted.
You see, I was going through a very bad break up. That is, a break up between our startup and the outsourced development team building our app. I sat there struggling with my thoughts while watching my wife expertly prepare the sandwich. I was pondering over the mistakes done in selection of the dev agency and the conduct of the project. And there was my wife, serenely going about making a sandwich.
I was watching my wife making our sandwiches.
I was mulling over the process of outsourced development.
And then the line of thoughts started overlapping.
Selection of Breads
My wife said that she had bought a couple of different breads over the weekend, which one would I like? The multi-grain or the white sandwich? When I went with the white sandwich one, she neatly stacked the slices.
In my head, I was going like -
Isn’t the bread just a “hygiene factor” in sandwiches? I mean, whoever has heard of a sandwich without bread? You do not buy a sandwich only for the bread. Yet, you do obviously care about the bread, don’t you?
Similarly a Dev Agency must have the hygiene factors covered and provide a framework for development and delivery:
- Experience of different cloud service-providers.
- Expertise in different DevOps strategies.
- Development tools: Be it the IDE, the RDBMS (or a NoSQL) or Project Management Tools, etc.
- Be it microservices or serverless, they should be experienced in that.
- And many more
Get Cheesy
Now that the shell — the bread — was ready, my wife started with the layers that make a sandwich. First was a Cheese layer. She asked me which cheese would I prefer, and then laid my choice out nicely on the bread. That made me think of the famous Sheldon Cooper quote from The Big Bang Theory — “In a proper sandwich, the cheese is adjacent to the bread to create a moisture barrier against the lettuce!”
In my head -
A sandwich with only bread and cheese is going to be the barest minimum sandwich. A lifesaver at best! People would not come to buy that, would they now? Certainly not in big numbers, and not at prime prices.
The Dev Agency should have
- Knowledge of various approaches for User Registration, User management, Access Control, Error Handling, Logs, Monitoring, Analytics, and so on. These are hygiene factors for any app.
- Also, most of these should be ready, in the form of plugins and libraries, as required, isn’t it?
- And that’s where the contributions from Open Source communities or Component vendors come handy.
- Readily available standard components with the right licensing — paid, or free — should be used.
- Same for SaaS services, or cloud APIs, and other services.
The Patty
When it came to choice of patty, I requested my wife to make a baked potato-based one, rather than the cottage cheese-based. I requested her to make it a bit spicy with flavours to tickle my palate. As she knows my taste, she was able to add the right ingredients and cooked an excellent patty. But she made a small one first. Took a bite, gave the rest for me to taste, and then adjusted the ingredients’ mix a little bit, before making the patty for my and her own sandwich.
In my head -
I think this is where the Dev Agency is being asked to do something that is not readily available off-the-shelf. May be something that the Dev Agency have no previous experience with. This is the core USP of the product based on the domain knowledge that needs to be built as per the client requirement. This is the bespoke functionality that is to be tailored to suit the specifications. This could be an implementation of an algorithm or some specific logic that needs to be built to serve the domain use cases. Also, the approach of building it at a smaller level to test and prove the working, talks about the quality control processes.
Sandwich station
While she was busy making the patty, I was distractedly watching the kitchen, my wife’s pride! My wife has meticulously crafted her kitchen to suit her needs. All the equipment is there, arranged exactly as she fancies. Her kitchen is normally well-stocked, well-ordered, nice-smelling and spotless clean!
In my head -
For Dev Agency, all the tools and related training should be in place:
- An office to work from, a WFH setup, rules for that, all should be in place.
- Devices like Laptops/Desktops/Cloud Workstations/mobiles for testing, cloud subscriptions, and more, all should be already covered.
- Processes for Requirement collection, Version Control, Internal Training, Documentation, Development, Testing, Project Management, Deployment, Agile, Scrum, you name it.
- Not to mention the legalities must be in order. You do not want to run afoul of the legal provisions
The Toppings
Having placed the nutritious patty on the cheese slice residing in the bread slices, my wife asked me my choice of toppings- Cucumber, lettuce or Tomatoes. I chose all three, and asked for olives also. She smiled, and fished out some from the fridge.
In my head:
There are again a number of very standard app features. For example, Notifications, reminders, scheduling, on-demand reporting, export of formatted data, etc. How are these different than the other standard components? Look, these component improve the user experience. And okay, users have come to expect these as nothing but hygiene, correct? This set of features also include the integrations with external systems through workflow tools.
The Finishing Touches
Now the delicious, nutritious sandwich was almost ready. Wifey dear asked me for the choices of sauces to add the last bit of tastiness to the sandwich. Whether mustard, mayonnaise or Vinegar? Boy, my mouth was already watering at the thought of the sandwich. It was a great relish!
In my head:
You know, the look and feel of a sandwich is already set — defined for several generations now. But the Dev Agency need to provide the User Experience, User Interface and User Convenience features. They should have UI/UX experts on hand, or if not, should be able to implement a third-party UI using their framework. And these days multi-device seamless experience is just hygiene: browser-based, mobile app, native or otherwise, if needed the watch form-factor, and so on. In other words, there should be few limitations.
It was very relaxing and rejuvenating sitting down with my wife to chat and eat the delicious sandwich. I had forgotten all my worries about the development woes, while watching her virtuoso performance making a delectable dish as per my tastes and liking, and then savouring it.
And thats exactly the experience of working with a outsourced Dev Agency should be! A well-versed organisation with all the necessary tools, proven processes and experienced people, with a sensitivity to the customer needs.
I have informally laid out the thoughts of the desirable characteristics of an outsourced software development agency in this part. I intend to be more formal, in future, regarding various aspects of outsourced development, based on my experiences working with a number of early-stage, bootstrapped startups, founded mainly by domain-experts.
