Redesigning the Service,

With insight from

POs & PMs

A blue curved arrow with an orange arrowhead pointing upward.

Story: Redcorp to Bluecorp

Recorp made a life changing turn in offshoring its ecommerce platform development in Sri Lanka in 2000. In the following years, to optimise its Sri Lanka’s entity, they opened this “new” business: Offshring Services – Bluecorp.

Bluecorp is today a sleeping beauty: 20 years of brave offshoring services for 40+ happy clients, managed along the scheme set up for Redcorp.

My role

My role is to modernise Bluecorp services, define a way to market and test it.

 

Design Thinking

Diverge, converge & test: we selected 2 main service determinants:

  • Service: Hybrid+ development team (+3 to +20 developers)

  • Clients: Strat Ups (Late Seed for minimum level of business and production maturity) and Scale Ups (Serie A)

    • Estimated production budget : between 300k€/year to 2m€/year

This whole website is a POC to start reorienting the service presentation.

Black and white portrait of a middle-aged man with gray hair and beard, wearing a dark collared shirt.

Assumptions and Questions

Here is the list that I want to discuss with you during our 45’ interview. Thank you for your time.

Why bother PMs or POs? Because “one size doesn’t fit all”

PMs & POs are the ones that will be impacted in their daily work by the hybrid team set up. Their opinions and the practical aspects of their situation is key to give sense or not to the use of offshring.

Our main aim is to define the criteria that makes this venture a necessary path or the contrary: “it will never happen here!”.

Foreword:

  • In my previous interviews, I met several POs that worked with various nearshore or offshore devs, with the whole expected spectrum of experiences… Some never did… If it is your case, your opinion still matters to me!

  • I avoid the terms like “talents” and other HR jargoon on purpose, beeing allergic to that specific jargoon. I hope you will accept my own vocabulary…

About the Product Team

  • Product Manager - Product Owner - Product Designer - Functional Analyst: Do you have these roles in your team?

  • Is this role scheme reflects your view?

A table with six columns labeled: Role, Strategic Vision, Backlog/Execution, User Experience, Requirements Analysis, and Technical Bridge, but no data entries. The table has a dark background with white text.
  • Familiar with using offshore devs?

    • Good experiences?

    • Bad ones?

    • None

  • What criteria makes offshoring a Must?

    • Product beyond Minimum Shipable stage

    • Growing feature requests/ obese backlog (Epics with validated attached value)

    • Modular product

    • Other

  • What criteria makes offshoring a No Go?

    • Company culture votes for close relationships (no free lancers, no nearshore, etc)

    • Product technical complexity

    • Product functional complexity

  • Your opinion on offshoring difficulties:

    • “Cultural” difference:

      • Capacity to challenge task assignment

      • Capacity to go “the extra mile”

      • Other

    • Competence/ level of expertise

    • Time difference

    • Other

  • Team member stability:

    • What is the average length of a dev stay in your team?

      • What is the longest?

  • Scalibility:

    • What is the average time needed to recruit a new member?

And a kind of joke

Language is a hurdle (in both direction sometimes…), but what is the difference between Offshore and Nearshore on that question?

Previous interviews: learnings

SV - Big bank - PO - Team of 10 dev, 4 Indian dev

“Recruited through one of our corporate sourcing contract. The guy are real members of the team. They pull my legs, once in a while” - Example of current status of asian offshoring: it is of quality.

JTDV - Intl Fair Organisation with stunning extranet - 6 squads of dev - PO

“We largely favor close contact relationships. We tried with freelancers in near countries but that was counter productive. Our dev stay in average 2 years.” - Example of offshore allergy but a stability issue.

GR - Consulting firm - PO as external consultant

“Indication of of a Scale up (Orep) is using extensively offshoring through a neighborhood Dev agency in Antwerp” - Confirming assistant & trust is key. And that Scale up is too late to strat the relationship.

BL - Big insurance company - PO

“Had experiences with various offshoring set up since 20 years. Not the same today: quality is there and hybrid model is now the standard”. 50% of the POs had previous experiences with nearshoring/ offshoring. 25% of which were bad experiences.