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Comment by andrewmutz | Hacker News Reader

Does outsourcing major strategic initiatives even work? Seems like the definition of the sort of things you shouldn't outsource

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Well for my clients they're often up against maxed-out resources or employees who are just mired in their day-to-day and need a sort of entrepreneur-in-residence. For me, I'm given one or several major strategic initiatives and then my job is to build a 'demonstrator' that hits all of those without needing to fully build them out.

My client (typically an executive) can then take the presentation to his or her leadership team or board to unlock the funding required to stand up the 'execution' phase of that initiative internally through hiring.

So I guess you could say I build MVPs or proofs-of-concept that, if they work and are desirable to the company, get spun out into new lines of business.

This sounds like amazing work, the best part of software engineering is coming up with a prototype and experimenting. Most of my personal projects are basically “I wonder if X is easy or hard, and if I can make it work”

Do you stick to a particular business domain? Eg finance, transportation, e-commerce? I’d think it would help you to build MVPs if you stayed in a specific domain, but it could be fun to move around a bit too :)

Also: how do you find clients? I feel like again this would come from having connections in a specific business domain? It feels like it should be hard to sell yourself as the “prototype person”, but how do you convince someone to let you prototype for them for a while?

1. Yeah I stick primarily to hospitality and consumer companies (B2C and B2B2C) with a large amount of tech debt; because they're so mired in keeping their current systems alive, they don't have time to innovate, so thats where I come in.

2. Word of mouth primarily. When they look at what I cost them vs. what the big consultancies – or even the midsize 'innovation consultancies' like Frog or IDEO cost, it's a no-brainer. I just blend basic financial rigor with a bit of visionary thinking and competitive research, and set my clients up for the win when they go ask for permission to go from idea to prototype to MVP to pilot.

I think the answer is "it depends".

No, not if you're doing it to save money. If you're doing it because someone else is better, then yes.

See: IBM's software engineering, vs Delta's offering of their maintenance ops to other airlines. One has really, really worked out, the other hasn't.

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