583.rst

Your Next Skill: FOSS Product Management
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:date: 2022-05-23 15:37
:author: james
:slug: 583
:status: draft

The classic reason to do open source is to share the load across organizations. First-class software-development is expensive. Compared to the cost of developing a software product, any one department's budget is usually relatively. This is true even in a giant, cash-rich company. Open source seems like an appealing way to shift some of those dev costs to somebody else's budget.

No matter which open source maturity ladder you look at, the top rung is going to involve having the skill to lead your own open source project. It is not easy to get to this level, but many orgs and companies get there. They write code, they ship it under open source license, put it on github, and they even do a reasonable job of taking PRs when they come in.

Most of these orgs stop climbing at that level. The maturity ladder says they are there! But they're missing the real value and they often come away from this experience vaguely dissatisfied.

Open source management is more complex than in-house, proprietary development. Somebody has to do the community work to get contributors into the project. Somebody also has to look at those issues and PRs, which don't come in at carefully planned times reflected in your sprints and Gannt charts. And while the software might be better, it doesn't cost less. Outside contributions aren't taking any major roadmap pieces off the internal workload. And all this doesn't add up to a bargain. The net return on time invested is often appallingly low.

What's often missing at this point is major partners --- orgs that show up, take a major piece of work off your plate and save you entire sprints worth of work. That's the part that most "mature" orgs fail at. They don't know how to invite those partners in, but more importantly, they also don't know how to negotiate with them and rely on them to take on major roadmap milestones.

There are so many reasons why orgs fail here. The biggest is that they have neglected to learn the open source approach to product management. Writing code is different from product management. Orgs have gotten good at the open source approach to writing code. Distributed development is easy-- the devs all know how to do that now.

Distributed product management is not the same set of skills. It requires different negotiation. It gets into stickier governance questions. It is much scarier for managers who are comfortable accepting outside development effort but feel threatened by outsourcing management functions.

We see this pattern a lot at OTS. Look around at your org's open source investments. Are your outside contributions producing real value? If they're not shaving sprints and milestones off your schedule, open source product management might be the next open source maturity rung you should climb.