Young Software Product Company's Challenges on Scrum

The company is small and young, they are trying to build a product, after the first release, and they receive many "project" requests from almost every new opportunity coming in to them. The team end up throwing the Scrum out of the windows to fulfill every single request for each project. They are adding on technical debts and have no time to clear the debt.

Does this sound familiar to you if you are in a small software start-up? Balancing between product development and business development is a tough game. On one hand you are consciously aware that you should not turn your company into a System Integrator where every deal is a project and required significant modification to your product. You know that you are not charging the customer using the System Integrator rate, and you are fully aware that you will be forced to maintain separate code base for each "project". Hence the maintenance cost is much higher compare to normal product sales. However, you are desperate to have some reference account to kick start your business. What could you do?

Could we treat the project Change Request (CR) the same way as we treated the support request? In normal Scrum project, I will reduce the capacity of the team to take on new items from product backlog after the release. For example, I will only cater say, 70% of the team capacity (base on average velocity from previous sprints in Release 1) for task allocation in 1st sprint of Release 2. I will communicate with the Product Owner that the remaining 30% will be reserved for support activities. However, rest assure that the team will not stay idle should there have no support requirement. As a standard Scrum practices, team will continue to work on user stories on the next sprint if they had completed earlier for the current sprint.

In this scenario, I will make every CR for projects into a support ticket. In this case, they will go through the investigation phase, appear in the product backlog and etc. The Product Owner should then take those support case into their product design consideration just like any other support request.