Every company has a few sacred cows. These are ideas that are exempt from criticism or questioning. Mostly these are sensible ideas. Well, until, they start holding up progress. Here are five sacred cows that companies have had to confront with when dealing with product offshoring…
1. “We do all our product development in one campus”. Several companies big and small have wrestled with this. Microsoft is probably the biggest. To their credit, they grabbed this sacred cow head-on, changed course and setup a product development center in Hyderabad, India. Now a lot of their end-to-end product development gets done there. What a change!
2. “We won’t outsource any of our product development”. Makes sense, after all, the conventional wisdom has been that you don’t outsource your crown jewels. Yet times have changed. Outsourcing sometimes can be about tapping into specialist skills, say, for testing services from companies like AppLabs.
3. “Our product leadership team has to be in one place”. This harks back to the days of separate executive floors. These days, things are very different. The product management stays close to the key markets and the engineering management is where cost-effective engineering talent is. [I wrote about this in an article: Product Manager’s Changing Relationships]
4. “We prefer acquisitions to incubation”. Indeed, companies like erstwhile Symantec were built almost entirely out of acquisitions. But most emerging markets doesn’t yet have a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem. If you want products that cater to these emerging markets, your best chance is to incubate them often in places like India.
5. “We don’t encourage matrix reporting in this company”. Matrix reporting has a bad reputation. Done poorly it can make decision-making slower and accountability fuzzier. But there is no escaping matrix reporting in the setting of product offshoring. It just has to be done. The focus has to be on doing it right. [Some of this is covered in this post: A Practical Framework for Successful Product Offshoring]
Unfortunately there is no such thing as painless product offshoring. It always involves deep change. So a run-in with some sacred cows is practically guaranteed. How the company deals with this becomes crucial to success.
I am sure some of you must be grappling with your company’s sacred cows. Did I miss any important ones?
Here are some that I can think of:
-”Product management cannot be offshored”. I agree that certain activities that need a direct user connect are tough to offshore, but by avoiding outsourcing altogether, product management is loosing out on some bright product ideas.
-”I will personally interview each member of the offshore team before staffing” Good luck on your staffing plans! Let us face it. The talent pool at offshore is primarily from a services background. Anybody who wants to create an exact offshore mirror image of an established product development team at onsite is headed for failure.
-”The biggest security risk is in the code getting compromised” I really think the biggest risk is in product features, release plans and the like getting compromised.
I posted my own software services rules that need to be broken a few days back.