They say you shouldn’t care about what other people think.
But we can think of countless times when you undoubtedly SHOULD care what other people think.
Applying to college - “out of my way admissions committee!”
Facing criminal charges in a jury trial - “I pronounce myself innocent!”
Wedding Planner - “sorry Karen, but if it were my wedding…”
So, in the spirit of rebellion, we sent out a survey to not one, but a whole lot of SaaS product and engineering leaders to hear what they think (mostly about their 2024 priorities and challenges, the open-text questions about our hairstyles here at The Gnar were strangely incomplete).
Our ~150 survey respondents represented a wide variety of SaaS software development teams, with a range of team sizes by headcount:
- 1 to 5 people (7%)
- 6 to 10 people (9%)
- 11 to 25 people (21%)
- 26 to 25 people (26%)
- 50+ people (37%)
Here are a few key things we learned:
Change happens - and it has an impact
88% of respondents reported that unplanned product features were added to their roadmap last year and those changes put a strain on resources.
Now unplanned features should be expected, but if the change is significant enough to strain resources - that’s a problem. The biggest issue likely isn’t that something was added, it’s that nothing else was taken off of the roadmap or the timeline didn’t change. Simply moving developers from one project to another doesn’t move the whole pile of work forward any faster (in fact, it’s slower). Plus, asking your internal team to simply do more work isn’t a recipe for retention and productivity.
Ramp up time is S-L-O-W
67% of the SaaS leaders we heard from said that new engineering hires take 3+ months to onboard and consistently deliver code to production. 
This one shocked us. We recently wrote about how you can easily spend $100k more than you should on a new dev hire, but with this onboarding timeline those are rookie numbers!
It’s important to think about your company’s needs and why you’re making that new hire. If it’s because you need a new feature built out or have a specific integration challenge you’re trying to solve, you may want to rethink how quickly you need it done or consider alternate solutions that ramp up much faster (The Gnar has onboarding down to a science and delivers production ready code in the first week of our engagements).
We think we can multitask
67% of our respondents have four or more major initiatives planned for this year and 42% have five or more. We’re stressed just thinking about it.
Biting off a lot of work isn’t a bad thing. But the challenge comes in when the initiatives you’re trying to accomplish aren’t comparable and require fundamentally different approaches and skillsets. For example, building new applications or new features both require starting (somewhat) from scratch, but reducing technical debt is a very different exercise in problem solving that involves an existing codebase and tech stack.
We think we can multi-task and get it all done, but the engineers doing the work may have a different opinion once they’re asked to switch back and forth.
Outsourcing?
86% of respondents don’t see outsourcing as a high cost but objections still remain.
Sometimes when you ask for the tea, you might get burned. When it comes to bringing on external partners, communication challenges and work output that matches expectations are objections our respondents are seeing.
When you do assess external software development options, think about the type of relationship you want to have and the firm you want to work with - and make sure they have the policies and processes to support those needs.
When considering The Gnar, remember our bug-free guarantee (we’ll repair any nonconformance with the spec in your released code for free within 12 months of acceptance) and commitment to speed (we’ll have production ready code in the first week).
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