Vendor Madness: Resist the Lure of the “Super Team”

 

How can you build software on small budgets and short timelines, without making everyone’s life worse? How can clients get a bunch of vendors on the same page? Is it even worth trying?

A Bad Way to Build Software?: This week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade chat about the problems you’re going to face when you hire multiple companies to build a single piece of software. We discuss the communication, latency and separate agendas that hinder the process of software creation and give advice on how to make it work.

 

4:28 — Rich: “When I go to management … I need dollars, I need timelines, and I need what it is…what are you going to give them, when, and how much is it going to cost.”

15:32 — Rich: “There is nothing that will bring more friction, more latency, and more disagreement than human beings that view themselves as orbiting around separate entities but have to somehow come together to build a thing.”

15:50 — Rich: “The single biggest risk to designing and building stuff is the dependencies and the reliance and the agendas of different groups of people.”

17:21— Paul: “The overall software experience is a unified thing, and it comes from a unified team. So if you put those different vendors in the room, really what you’ve done is you’ve incurred a month or more of teaching them to communicate with each other, and they’re all going to have different processes that they use to get stuff done.”

20:51— Paul: “What you’re doing is creating a pathological work environment, even if these places have good work environments themselves.”

28:19— Paul: “If people would take this seriously, and think about it, they could save themselves so much… just so much emotional pain.”

28:58 — Paul: “It’s a big messy world out there… but vendor madness is very dangerous.”

LINKS

• Kickstart Every Idea With a Real Product Plan 
• Are You My Digital Product Studio?
• Software as a Product
• Software as a Service
• Two Pizza Rule
• Jeff Bezos

Track Changes is the weekly technology and culture podcast from Postlight, hosted by Paul Ford and Rich Ziade. Production, show notes and transcripts by EDITAUDIO. Podcast logo and design by Will Denton of Postlight.

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