24 Sep
Many founders believe that product development cannot be outsourced. They have tried multiple times and couldn’t succeed.
Why it is so difficult, why even the best of best founders couldn’t achieve it.
Let’s breakdown some major challenges:
- No one understands the product better than the founders.
- Lack of control over development and timelines.
- Tracking is super difficult.
- Communication is a challenge. Language is another.
- We don’t know who is actually working.
- The code quality is very poor…
- Hard to keep remote people accountable.
- Remote developers are far away from the product vision then in-office developers.
You speak to 10 founders and you will have 20 more reasons around the above lines. But these are the major ones…
I understand, why someone will want to suffer when an in-office developer is available with the best of the convenience and reach.
Even this is challenging but not impossible. You’ll find many success stories who have done that. Zapier is one to name it.
Zapier’s team is totally remote. They even paid $10,000 to their developers to leave the San Fransisco city because it is super expensive.
Alright, Let’s figure out the value proposition. If you succeed then what’s on the other hand.
Company: XYZ SaaS Product
Description: CRM Automation Software for Enterprises.
In-Office USA
Dev Team Cost:
3 React Developers: ($3,600 X 3 ) = $10,800
1 Server Admin: $4,000
1 Product Manager: $4,000
Net Monthly Cost: $18,800
Annual Dev Cost: $2,25,600
Remote Team India
Dev Team Cost:
3 React Developers: ($1,800 X 3 ) = $5,400
1 Server Admin: $2,000
1 Product Manager: $2,000
Net Monthly Cost: $9,400
Annual Dev Cost: $1,12,800
Congratulations! You saved 50% cost annually on 5 people team. Put in marketing to get more customers.
These numbers seem super cool, but let’s face some real-world challenges. The challenges and struggles which we face while actually getting it done.
Let’s see, How it cannot be done.
- You have only 1 remote developer and the rest team is in-office.
- You have 5 developers coding every day remotely but, none of them are product manager skills.
- You have outsourced everything and only the marketing, sales, management team sits in-office.
- Your product map is not clear.
- You’re don’t like solving remote developers’ problems.
- You don’t have a product management software or the team is not using it.
- You believe that you have assigned the task and it will be done at the end of the week.
- You’re tracking the remote developers on every minute, with screenshots, remote desktop, and whatnot.
Getting your product remote requires super precision and focus at the beginning and classic management later on.
You’ll get better and better along the way. But if you don’t start you’ll stay behind the people who do.
