The Balancing Act between Customer Projects and Building Product
Hi folks,
I find myself constantly torn between getting customer deliverables done and making investments in code and process improvements to optimize my operations. To be able to truly scale a productized service, I need to balance the two but no matter how hard I plan, each week just seems to go by fighting customer deliverable fires.
Do you guys have any strategies to balance your time between customer projects and product building?
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Hey Neil - it's definitely not an easy balance, and think most productized service owners have been there.
To double check - are you the one delivering on the work? If yes, that makes it twice as hard since you don't have a scalable product given you haven't gotten yourself out of actual delivery.
If that's the case (and assuming you have a steady-ish flow of leads), then you need to find a way to get this off your plate. Whether through part-time or full time staff, the less you're involved in delivery the better.
If you've already out of delivery work and don't have budget to hire a full time ops manager or account manager, then the next best thing is blocking the first 60-90 minutes per day to do long term work. Use Freedom or Cold Turkey so you're not checking notifications (those dopamine hits are nasty!) and from there you'll at least have 3-5 hours per week dedicated to long term work while the rest of the time you can work on putting out customer fires guilt free.
Do you have a link to your company/product? Getting the details would probably help!
Hey @jtan7th thanks! That makes a lot of sense. Right now, I'm one of 3 core team members delivering on the work. If I'm not directly delivering on work, I'm reviewing, approving etc.
Here's the site - https://dabble.so
Basically, we use hyper-realistic 3d renders as a replacement for traditional product photography in e-commerce. We're combining human artists and automation to help these ecomm businesses scale up product photography.
The issue is we have a pipeline of artistic content creation, automation, approvals etc that requires at least 2 - 3 people in a single project workflow to get done. We can't hire that many people right now - but we do have 2 part time 3d artists who we work with. Still there's a lot of work, managing the projects.
We recently set up a new workflow in Airtable that's taken some of the overhead off this process, but for anything more sophisticated it seems like we might need to build some tooling ourselves.
You're right that there are 2 problems here. customer delivery and general admin / firefighting stuff. I think having a better routine can solve the second part. I just installed Cold Turkey so thanks for that recommendation, lets see whether I can make this work.
For the first issue - I definitely need to figure out a way to get myself off the hook for scheduled customer delivery work.
Thanks for tips!