Focus on Core Value, Outsource the Rest
My name is Max and I’m the product owner for docu-tools.com, a small software company specialised on the construction industry. As a product owner one of my biggest challenges are the limited development resources. Everyday new feature requests and refactoring tasks arise, but my pipeline in the backend team is limited to the workload of 4 devs.
Last year I had to give one of my colleagues the task to create a service for thumbnail generation. As an amateur I was convinced that in the time of cloud, SaaS and API Economy as such basic functionality can easily be rented at some place, since almost every software I know needs thumbnails (Instagram, Facebook, Trello, Slack, ….). Nevertheless it turns out that there is no thumbnails generator out there which can be easily integrated into our software, so my colleague spent a couple of weeks developing a scalable solution for that (we are processing hundreds of thousands of images a month and a lot of other “documents” for thumbnails).
Over the last weeks I was looking for a trust-worthy, easy to use and well priced platform where my team could find such small and scalable APIs/functions to integrate into our product, since there are many more features to come this year.
Yes, I found RapidAPI, but the only “trustworthy” APIs I found there, where the common big API Economy players: Twilio, SendGrid, GooglleMaps, etc. However, these APIs solve large specific problems (Communication, Payment, Localisation, …) but what about the common smaller parts in every Software (Various types of Conversion, Image Transformation, 2FA, Web Crawling, …)? →
In this regard I cannot stop thinking about the car industry. When I look at the Tesla Model S and all the subcontractors they have in place for all the various parts I feel tremendously jealous. I always picture myself only caring about the core values of our product (import construction plans, setting pins on plans, reports & templates), like Tesla does → bottom right corner.
Sometimes in the car industry these suppliers are big players themselves but I have seen small companies with only a few employees here in Austria supplying critical parts to big car manufacturers all around the world. They do this by providing high quality and constant innovation.
Coming back to my thumbnail example I think the same should be true. Imagine my colleague would spent another 4 months working on this service. Of course it would be improved. But again: limited resources. Thumbnails are not the core value of my product so as a product manager I will stop spending time on it and leave the service as it is although it totally contradicts with my desire for high quality. An external developer specialised in only this feature, serving several clients would lead to better quality, lower costs and more innovation.
Of course you could counter with “there are function libraries, your developer won’t write the thing from scratch!”. The core algorithms for generating images isn’t the issue here. By the amount of images we process resources scaling is a true concern and since we receive many various types of other documents we need to generate thumbnails for too, one library wouldn’t be sufficient. And in the end, just the library isn’t enough, how is the data passed to it and the results stored? I want more than a library, I want a service.
Due to all these various reasons I strongly believe that it is possible to facilitate the hosting and quality control of products created by small „indie“ developers in a way that people like me can rent them securely without concerns about reliability, scaling, security or guarantees (version).
Me and my colleagues are trying to change this! Please support us in our endeavour: If you are a API developer or used to be one, take our survey: https://goo.gl/Ww8zkZ
thanks.
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