Product Agencies as a Force Multiplier
By: Christopher Brereton
Tags: Agency, Product Management, Leadership, Technology, Startup

I’m really lucky to have met and built relationships with a lot of truly talented product leaders. Often I find that I am the least intelligent in the room, which is something I LOVE, but something I’ve been sharing with them lately needs to get shared more broadly then between two or three of us at a time.

I was wrong about agencies.

I have to admit that previous to becoming a partner in and running an agency, I viewed them as something that I didn’t believe in too much. I knew they had their place, but I didn’t spend enough time thinking about what that place was. I had a naive opinion that the people within the agency world didn’t care deeply enough about the problems we would be asking them to help us solve, nor would they be able to gain the context fast enough to attack the problems at the speed we needed to in the start up world. I had always considered the agency world as a tool for solving the “par for the course” tech needs we had rather than an opportunity for innovation or scale.Well… I WAS WRONG.

Agencies can and should be a force multiplier for your strategy and/or a cost effective vehicle for rapid innovation.

After spending a few years as an advisor to the Founder and CEO of Sidebench and seeing the incredibly talented humans that create here take on very complex and challenging problems, I started to see clearly what a costly mistake I had made for so long in my product career. I started to realize that the time, money, and risk that I was working with was likely the less effective way to dream big, make big bets, and grow asymmetrically.

Think about it for a second. The time, energy, and money it takes to recruit great talent is JUST THE BEGINNING of the cost to innovate. Then after 3–6 months for recruiting per new talent, you have the on boarding, training, cultural grafting, and day to day management of each individual you bring on to the team. You’re looking at 6 months as a best case scenario — PER HIRE — before they start becoming a meaningful contributor.

If you’re using an agency for innovation, you likely could have spun up MVPs to many problems you’re seeking to attack at the same time for roughly the same cost so that you’re getting upstream to market without the overhead of recruiting, hiring, training, and managing. At the beginning, we’re just seeking to find product market fit and rapidly iterate to find it. An agency is an incredible and low risk / high speed option for that type of product development. You can think of the agency as a flexible team that you don’t have to worry about the cost or people management capacity needed to still get to similar MVPs in a short amount of time. All of that extra time and energy you’re not spending on the people management component can be spent on experimenting your way into market.

Using an agency for scale is also an incredible option. Let’s assume you already have an internal innovation team. Your forte is innovating on your core product, you’ve already found product market fit, and you’re optimizing that product. Once you cross product market fit and move into optimization mode, your new job is to find new products and services to scale the business in new ways. Again → agencies are a great answer for this. Keep your core team focused on the money makers and task an agency with attacking adjacent problems without the risk of bloating your team and distracting everyone with new or novel ideas. Assign a few internal leaders, an executive sponsor, and bring in an agency that’s built to innovate and take on new endeavors. Now you’re moving incredibly fast with none of the cultural risk and need less overall people managers which means you’re also keeping your overhead lean and the complexity relatively simple.

Now heres the kicker — agencies can be a force multiplier for your innovation or scale because of the breadth of problems they see. It is nearly impossible to imagine that your internal teams have seen or have the breadth of exposure an agency does. The agency model has some inherent exposure to problems and patterns across industries or verticals that enable creative and compelling problem solving in a way that your internal team is almost positively lacking.

If I wasn’t busy building my product (Sidebench — the agency) and was starting to build my next venture, I’d surely be working toward product market fit with a small core team, augmented by an agency like us to accelerate our ability to innovate and iterate with a dramatically reduced amount of risk. If we were post product market fit, I’d be working on our adjacent products and services that would open up new opportunities to grow the business in ways that would be hard for us to do internally. I feel like I spent years of wasted time on things I could have worked through an agency where I could have learned faster, spent less, and risked less on hiring teams. At the end of the day, the most expensive thing is time — years of wasted time is hard to stomach.