Imulus Product Tsar

It’s well discussed that service based companies often have a rough go at producing viable products. There is an inherent tension between provisioning resources for products vs addressing immediate billable service work. Pay the bills now, or invest in an uncertain future?

Many who’ve commented on this tension seem to believe it’s either or. Companies that try both often fail at one, or worse yet, they sell both short. At Imulus, we love doing the client work and believe it helps us discover new ideas for products. From day one, we decided client work would always be core to our identity, so the decision to move the company entirely into products just isn’t on the table.

During the last few years we’ve stumbled down the product path. Stacks was rolled out about a year or so behind schedule. Support Details was a quick win, but we’ve been slow to update it with exciting new functionality. In recent months we’ve added several other products to the cooker. This has prompted us to more closely examine the product development relationship with services.

Last month we implemented the idea of a Product Tsar.

The Product Tsar is a temporary 4 month stint with the responsibility to oversee product development. We are currently pulling from our developer team to fill the Tsar role, although that may change in the future. Bruce Clark has been helping to head up Stacks development and has nicely transitioned into this role. The first two weeks are used to gather product ideas, review what’s been accomplished and map out a list of items for development. The co-founders and the Product Tsar get together to prioritize the product development based on a combination of factors including revenue potential, complexity and street cred. We then make a time commitment to the Product Tsar. In this 4 month stint we’ve committed to a minimum of 15 hours of dedicated product work each week.

As the weeks progress, the Tsar reports in weekly, to update our Project Managers and co-founders on the status of products. The weekly status offers the Tsar a chance to gauge how busy the office is and what un-utilized resources could be applied toward product work.

Once the 4 months are over, the co-founders will review the Tsar’s work and the next senior developer on our team will take the reigns.

So far it seems to be working for us, but only time will tell.