Freelance innovators
I’ve been doing some research on project managers recently with the goal of understanding the problems they deal with on a day to day basis. And then trying to figure where freelancers might be to solve that problem.
One of the project managers I interviewed on ADP List mentioned:
“Constant development and improvement is key in a business looking to stay ahead.”
Which I already knew from reading some of the Strategyzer’s books and the Jeremy Gutsche’s book Create the Future. Companies want to innovate, but many struggle with doing it well. And the need for innovation is critical because industry lines are blurring, so your next competition might come from left field.
My question is: can freelancers facilitate that innovation in a meaningful way?
Not being the simple service providers or merely filling a mercenary role by being told what to build, but helping companies discover what big products to build, and then build them. If there ever was a place for consistent need of work, this is it. And being able to tap into that market with freelancers could create consistent work for them.
This would at least target freelancers who do user research, product design, development, and UX. But if you’re supposed to create a startup by filling a very specific niche, is that pulling from too broad a freelance base? I don’t know.
Building product well
At the end of the day, innovation comes down to building product. And Marty Cagan has a great book called Inspired that I’m about 1/3 of the way through with. The book is all about helping product managers lead teams to create tech products that people love.
Two things he said which stood out to me as problem areas for using freelancers in this process:
- Ideally, teams should be colocated (at the very least, in the same building)
- When you have a team, you should not break it up.
Colocaiton
The state of freelancing now means that people are dispersed and working in all sorts of different time zones. Colocation is really only possible if you hire employees.
Cagan does mention that, while it’s still possible to do build great product while dispersed, you’re operating from a big disadvantage. Building truly great products is not easy, and you want to give yourself the best chance of success. So with the intention of helping a company innovate, it would seem crazy to offer them suboptimal ways of doing, namely, only using dispersed teams.
Team familiarity
And the second point I kind of already knew deep down, but was willing to ignore it until it came up in testing. But the model of freelance work that I’ve built doesn’t require pitching. People join when they want and deliver projects same day. But that means you’re constantly meeting new people to work on projects with. That would be beneficial for freelancers to network, but it doesn’t appear beneficial for companies who need innovation.
I think of it as matchmaking in a game, but for work. You join a lobby and you’re paired with whoever else joins at that same time. That works for games, but that might not work for big projects like Bedrok’s value proposition is built on:
Same day delivery on any size digital project.
And for games, it actually does break at a certain point. Playing with random people in a competitive game massively increases your chance of losing if you’re playing against an organized team. You can say the same for sports too. Or military. Unorganized is inferior to organized in a competitive sense.
The same very well might be true here. Your competitors are simply other companies with in-house innovation teams that aren’t broken up every new project.
Of course you could build systems to help random people communicate. Let them know what their responsibilities of joining this team are, the commitments they have, etc… So you only let in people ready and willing to communicate well. But still sub optimal…
While innovating for companies would be an interesting way to produce guaranteed work for freelancers, it seems that, if one day it is possible, it might be a ways off.
