I’m now recognizing in the very near future, I will become a bottleneck. Biz dev, keeping the blog going, talking with press, clarifying requirements, etc. is taking up more time than we expected. That means I’m not doing the SaaS research I need to. This will be a problem.
I raised the issue with the team and the proposed mitigations (in order of preference) are:
- Find an additional team member to help drive the SaaS research I was going to own.
- Pull someone off dev work to help on the research front
- Decrease the amount of time I dedicate to this blog (which means we wouldn’t get to share interesting problems like this)
- Do less SaaS research
I’m chugging away to pound out a solution – will keep you posted.
3 Weeks to Live 
Jan 17, 2011 @ 14:51:53
The obvious answer is to throw more guys at it. Maybe #9?
Jan 19, 2011 @ 09:20:37
It sounds like prioritization is critical on this project given the 3 week project timeline. Also, can you outsource research? I think the “research” aspect that you’re referring to here is identifying the services, which to me doesn’t require a high degree of skill and will not deliver any sort of competitive advantage. This sounds like an interesting problem for the mechanical turk and the opportunity cost of testing outsourcing this seems low. Bringing on and managing a new hire is expensive and, as described in “The Mythical Man-month”, may not even deliver you a net gain in productivity or reduce your time to launch.
Just a thought,
-Gus
Jan 19, 2011 @ 11:12:24
Great comment Gus, thanks! We’ve considered outsourcing the research but we’re still figuring out how to represent that research in our decision engine. We need our researchers to work very closely with our developers to ensure the data we gathering can be useful.
Once we get to a point where we’ve got a way to structure and process the research data, it’s a little easier to crowdsource via MTurk, or even better, our own community.
Hoping to make an announcement on our official mitigation later today.