make it your project or product?
As I started to work for elbstack in April 2020 as COO one of my first tasks was to have a clear view of our service offering. As elbstack is a software agency customers hire our employees for money per hour, the classic body-leasing business. On a larger scale, customers can hire entire teams to work on their internal projects, to implement services, frontends and Apps. Usually they also need some kind of project-management capacity to make these projects successfull. So far so good. This is common agency business. There are hundreds of agencies here in Germany who can handle these kinds of work. More or less technology driven, some of them are specialized in software stacks (Azure vs. AWS, PHP vs. JS, Shopify vs. Shopware, you name it), some of them focus themselves on special areas (CRM, eBusiness, BigData, …), some are pure body-leasing companies without preferences and some have a wide range of offerings.
In my observation, most of this common agency business leads to some of the following problems:
- body-leasing of randomly assembled engineers leads to composite software, which is not really “made with love”
- the purpose of these projects is not always clear and followed by leased engineers, what may reduce the commitment to the project
- sponsors often feel exploited while paying much money for external help
- problems are solved by implementing the best known (technology based) solution and not by implementing the preferred solution of the end-customer to solve his problems
- motivation of engineers may be reduced, the longer a project is running
- the motivation to build a well tested, feasible software and have a nice developer experience is not the main motivation of most of the sponsors
- as there are professional near- and offshore companies, there is a fierce price battle on the market, which may lead in implementing “just what’s needed”
Regarding this among other things, we at elbstack decided to not focus on project-business only from day one. We decided to build up our own projects which lead to products. We want to become a product company!
From this day on, we separate the project- from the product-business. Products are our own babies with ideas from our staff to build up a successfull, autonomous company earning money with this product.
Definition: In marketing, a product is an object or system made available for consumer use; it is anything that can be offered to a market to satisfy the desire or need of a customer.In retailing, products are often referred to as merchandise, and in manufacturing, products are bought as raw materials and then sold as finished goods. A service is also regarded to as a type of product.
Until now we build these product companies / products following our vision “boosting dreams to brilliance”:
- Tixl — our own Crypto token and offering a completely new environment for decentralized apps launching
- Polychain Monsters — one of the most successful NFT projects in 2021 in terms of trading volume and ROI
- Rocknitive — our IoT full service company to solve complex problems from A-Z. Hardware, firmware, connectivity, app, backend, administration, operations, analytics and neural networks
- WARDdrones — our company to engineer, build and run AI-based automated flight drones to protect several facilities
- WeBurn — an often featured fitness-App in the Apple store which is now one of the top fitness apps for women in Europe
Apart from the success of these single product companies there are more big advantages for elbstack and its customers working in a product-based habit:
- Gathering of ideas with Design Thinking patterns
- Knowing the customer in every phase of the product lifecycle
- implementing robust software in an agile way from MVP to the successful product
- providing complete product teams with excellent product ownership
- the approach to joint risk sharing is included in our dna
- products are made with love and dedication
Coming back to our project-business from the beginning, there are nice side-effects to increase the chances to have successfull projects, where employees with a product mindset are involved. Because with this attitude we make the customers projects to “our own” projects. We share risks and success together. This increases quality, involvement, motivation and at least success.
And this is the point: the people are the same, but the way of being involved is completely different. A german hardware store has a claim “make it to your own project”. Meaning, to take over the full responsibility and invest your heart and soul in your project. In a professional environment, where people are hired to help companies in implementing solutions, it is more worthy to “make it to your own product” from my experience. A tiny but critical difference in motivation.
What do you think? What are your experiences?
