Unsticking an enterprise demand at Elucidat
What it looks like to take the thing a full roadmap has no room for, and get it done anyway. A ~100-person e-learning SaaS company. A top-tier consulting client whose contracts demand serious content security. Six months, one special-projects team, delivered — with an extension offered at the end.
If PepsiCo is the large end of the scale, this is the scaleup end: the same kind of company that hires me today.
What you walk into
A mature SaaS product with a full roadmap and real enterprise customers. One of them — a top-tier consulting firm — needs content-security features the product doesn't have. The kind of requirement that lives in procurement checklists and security reviews, not in anyone's sprint backlog.
The team is good but completely full. Every person is already committed to the roadmap that keeps the rest of the customers happy. Pulling them off it to chase one enterprise deal puts everything else at risk. Doing nothing loses the deal. Months pass like that.
What actually has to happen
You lead a dedicated special-projects team whose only job is the thing the main roadmap can't fit. The setup is the whole trick: one defined outcome, an end date, and people whose roadmap is that outcome.
Inside it, the work is two-layered. Understand what the enterprise client's security requirements actually mean — not the checkbox, the threat behind it — and turn that into features the product owns permanently, not a one-off patch. Enterprise features bolted on as a detour become drag; done properly, they become the answer to the next enterprise buyer's checklist.
Along the way, the release process itself was the constraint nobody had the room to fix. We improved it so the special project could move — and the improvement stayed with the company after the team disbanded.
What comes out the other side
- Enterprise content-security features delivered in ~6 months, for a top-tier consulting client
- A better release process the whole company kept
- An extension offered at the end — the client wanted the team to stay
What you learn
A scaleup doesn't have a people problem. It has a shape problem: the roadmap is full of work that already sells, and there's no slot for the thing that would sell next. A small team with a single outcome and an end date fits into that slot without breaking what already works.
That's the job I do today as a special-projects lead, just with a smaller surface area than PepsiCo.
It starts with a 2-week roadmap and delivery review.