Sunny skies with consistently pleasant weather, said the weather forecast. Great summer time in Los Angeles, it is. But founders as we are, instead of heading to a beach, we at around to discuss the not-so-pleasant state of affairs with startup hiring. The conversation veered towards ‘full-stack working’.
We were discussing how hard it is to hire, even as we hail the startup renaissance in Los Angeles. It's good that we have a Tinder and a Snapchat here but that also means we compete for talent like never before. So, maximizing the performance of every employee we can retain, seems to be the answer for early stage startups. Full-stack working - that seems to be the name.
In ContractIQ, our front end engineer also throws up questions on information architecture and hierarchy. Our dev shop on-boarding team is my go-to team for picking holes on our landing page copies (the LA homepage for app developers needs another one of those tear downs). I (even though have never written code), hold an argument against doing our own chat implementation in favor of something like Pusher.
I don't claim this is something unique to us. Most early stage startups are wired and limited by constraints to think and act full-stack. If you've hired well, you can see this behavior well into 100+ employees in your startup.
While on this conversation, I couldn't help but to relate to what happens on the ContractIQ platform. Inspite of making the best matches possible (between dev shops and startups), some times startups don't say good things about dev shops. The root cause is the friction between the full-stack mindset of startups vs. the consulting mindset of dev shops.
We have often attacked outsourcing as an unreliable, befuddling and often a pricey endeavor for startup. I don't debate it, for it's true in several cases. But there is a reason and it would be good for startups to know what to expect.
Startups eschew elaborate documentation in favor of brain-storming and whiteboarding. Agencies / Dev shops prefer clarity. They both are right. When full-stack workers discuss, the outcome is often better than one person documenting the requirements. When dev shops become a part of this conversation, however, the time they spend is money spent. Most startups don't get it till they see the bills.
The product manager or the founder of the startup has to craftily optimize his/her product across experience, performance and cost levers. Dev shops they hire, on the other hand, have no one person who is measured for getting all of these right. The project manager in a dev shop is a time keeper, first and foremost. The designer is a pixel perfectionist and they are proud of it. The architect is a borrowed resource with no skin in the game beyond the next milestone approval. Dev shops are optimizing for the ‘here and now’ utilization of people.
I don’t blame the dev shops entirely. They are structured to optimize for time, because time billed is money tilled to the bank. In fact, if a dev shop starts fielding full-stack workers for every role, chaos will prevail.
When a whirl of tradeoffs have to be negotiated to allow for the emergence of a product roadmap and that roadmap is being executed by an outsourcing company, there is bound to be that friction between ‘full-stacking thinking’ expectation of the product manager and ‘stop-clock billing’ culture of dev shops.
Startups (with understandably high expectations) should also recognize that their work is one among the items in a dev shop's portfolio and so, their structure would not allow for full-stack thinking (for a 'project' that lasts for weeks.).
Smarter dev shops that have worked well with startups through the challenges of scale, have someone in-house that’s a full-stack thinker. Some call them product managers. Some called them Entrepreneurs-In-Residence. They understand the right trade-offs to make and often significantly influencing the product roadmap, due to the advantage of being someone who has been there before and yet removed from the battle, enough to take calls not influenced by emotion or euphoria.
There is someone out there who acts as a perfect counterbalance to the urges of an entrepreneur to get it done and dusted, right away.
In ContractIQ’s marketplace when a seasoned startup founder starts out being skeptical about outsourcing, we often identify a dev shop that can put a full-stack thinker in the front.
At scale though, the problem disappears. Professionals/specialists get to the table from both the sides and it’s hardly a clash of expectations.
Until then, if you are an entrepreneur, expect that you would most definitely not meet a full-stack thinker on the other side.
Give me a holler if you are in LA or SoCal and are looking to build great products. There are a bunch of good dev shops with full-stack thinkers. You just need to seek them for the right contexts.
