For a startup company, creating new products is an important step for attracting more customers. But with all the work that happens, doing this can become challenging. For this, outsourcing is a surprisingly useful move. Here is how you can effectively tap into it to boost your development efforts.
The Challenges Of Product Management For A Startup Company
While you might think of product management as solely about developing a new product, there is more to it. It involves other stages in the product life cycle, such as market positioning and providing support for customers purchasing it. These different aspects make the work a complex one and create various challenges for management teams.
Time Constraints
With all the tasks that product management teams juggle, they might find time sometimes not being on their side. That is especially true for a small startup company that might have a limited team. Those time constraints can make it hard to fully pursue the development of the product before release, resulting in a less than satisfactory delivery.
Conflict Between Short Term And Long Term Objectives
Product management teams often work with both a forward-looking strategy and a short-term plan for immediate concerns. However, these two approaches can sometimes clash with each other. When this happens, the company might find itself unable to satisfy the needs of both.
Faster Innovation Cycles
Competition is tough for a startup company. While your new product might be groundbreaking today, a new one can eclipse it the next. To meet this challenge, you need to embark on faster development cycles. Like the general time constraints, you might find yourself lacking the resources to keep up with these cycles.
What Outsourcing Can Provide Your Startup Company
With all these challenges, you will need something that can help you expand the capabilities of your product management team. Here, outsourcing offers several key benefits that you would want to consider.
Better Time Management
By having extra hands in your product management team, you can allocate tasks more effectively. The outsourcing firm also adheres to the deadlines you set about for the project, ensuring results are delivered on schedule. This also gives you more time to focus on other critical aspects of the development cycle.
Decrease In Development Costs
Developing and fielding a new product can incur considerable costs of which labor is a major contributor. Through outsourcing, you can expand your team to meet development needs without spending too much on new personnel. Additionally, it gives you access to resources that might be too costly for you to procure on your own.
Reduced Risks
Launching a new product on the market is always a risky effort that businesses have to take. But with outsourcing, you can mitigate many of those risks. It does this by giving you additional support in doing various product management tasks. This gives you greater confidence in embarking on new product development efforts.
Planning Your Product Management Outsourcing Efforts
As is with any outsourcing effort, your startup company needs to have a clear idea of where it is going when embarking on this. One question you might have here is when you should decide to go for it.
A common answer is if you don’t have enough expertise to manage a new product. This might seem odd, as you are expected to be knowledgeable in the products that you release.
But as noted earlier, managing a product involves different tasks, some of which you might not be proficient in. It can be even more difficult if that product is a complex one outside your usual offerings. Here, an outsourced team can handle some of the more complex work while you focus on core development duties.
The Product Management Tasks Your Startup Company Can Outsource
But which of the different product management tasks can your startup company send out? That depends on what you need. However, you would want to pay special attention to those that require an external perspective.
Such tasks include:
- Competitive analysis
- Analyzing the success of current products
- Gathering requirements for product development
- Creating product roadmaps and prioritizing product features
- User research and analysis
An outsourced team will be able to give you an unbiased look at these tasks. This new perspective will help you better gauge the feasibility of the product and plan out other associated tasks accordingly.
Working With Your Outsourced Product Management Team
Before starting with the external product management team, you need to discuss with them their exact duties. Point out which areas of the management work they need to focus on most and which ones they need to coordinate closely with you. This will help them determine how much room they can work in and adjust their processes accordingly.
Test the team in the first few weeks of the project. During this time, you can determine issues like cultural fit and current knowledge about the project. Assign them a small project first that is related to the main project for this purpose.
Keeping The Team Independent
Considering that this is your product that they are working with, it might be tempting to oversee the work closely. But don\’t try pushing your monitoring system to them. Remember that these firms already have their systems in place.
Instead, what you should do is learn more about those systems and their preferences. You can then take the initiative to learn more about these and find out how you can integrate them into your system.
Developing An Effective QA Process For Your Startup Company
Quality assurance is an essential aspect of product management. Thus, you would want to have an effective process for it. Here, you would want to establish clear review protocols that will guide the outsourced team.
For this, focus on the different critical aspects of the product. Go on the assumption that they are not always going to work as expected. That will help you and the outsourced team to be more scrutinizing in your review of the product before release.
Create The Best Products For Your Startup Company With Outsourcing
With proper planning and implementation, outsourcing can help you accelerate the development and release of new products. But for that, your startup company would need the right partner. Get in touch with us and we will be ready to help.