Hire a Dedicated Development Team

After the COVID-19 pandemic, companies worldwide understood that in-house teams are no longer the best way to do business. Now entrepreneurs are using the outsourcing model to maintain their business processes. However, what should you do if you need tech experts to solve various issues? The answer to this question is to hire a dedicated development team.

Businesses can hire experts without conducting countless interviews and by getting an experienced team using software development service agencies. 

But a fast and streamlined onboarding time isn’t the only reason to choose dedicated teams. In our article, we will detail the many advantages of hiring a dedicated software development team that will suit your needs.

What is a Dedicated Development Team?

A dedicated development team is an offshore software development strategy where a company hires a dedicated team to work exclusively on its projects. Unlike outsourcing, the dedicated team becomes an extension of the company and collaborates closely with the in-house team while managed by the customer.

Why Consider Hiring a Dedicated Software Development Team?

Over 68% of US businesses outsource their development. More than 70% of British business people want to outsource and 48% of them are doing this right now.

Large and medium-sized businesses want to outsource their in-house development using the outsourced software teams model for different reasons:  

Launching a New Product

Building a dedicated software development team to make a new product is an effective way for startups and enterprises to start the development way as soon as possible.

For both startups and existing businesses, we advise the use of a software developers team model to save time and money during your development.

Long-Term Projects with Updates

If the company needs to update its current stack, it will be most effective to find a talented group to do this with a time-saving approach. 

Now businesses can update their requirements while maintaining the high quality of their products throughout the entire development way.

Scaling

If the business is going to scale, it’s crucial to think about having a dedicated software team. It is advantageous to outsource software development to a software team model that is either from the country where you are opening a new office or its members have relevant expertise in your domain and tech stack. In one case or the other, the company wins.

Companies with a Limited Budget

It is also possible for small businesses and startups with a limited budget to benefit from an outsourced team model. 

For some projects and countries, like the USA, France, Germany, and others, it is not profitable to hire an in-house group, where the rates of developers are high. Here it’s vital to have the choice of whatever to outsource to other countries that have a lower rate. For example, Central and Western Europe have an extensive talent pool and competitive environment.

Who To Hire for Your Dedicated Team? (Structure)

The dedicated software developers team is formed entirely based on the client’s requirements, some of which are:

• Qualifications
• Number of developers and other experts
• Talent skills

Every year, the top outsourcing and off-shoring countries receive a quality index rate based on their qualifications. Ukraine has enjoyed a lead position with its proactive specialists for several years in a row.

A developers’ team is always dependent on the needs of the project. It allows optimizing the hiring conditions and adapting them to the projects as much as possible. 

A software developers team dedicated to the software development would be made up of these positions:

Project Manager (PM)

They are the link between the team and the client.

Project managers control the entire path for the team: from the workload and deadlines to the delegation of work to certain project members.

Business Analyst

A business analyst conducts business and tech research on the project. 

The main task of a business analyst is to ensure high-quality compliance of a product with the company’s goals and technical specifications.

UI/UX Designers

They need to be responsible for the product’s interface and aesthetics. 

The main goal of UI/UX designers main goal is to identify the problems that users face and try to solve them with the design issues. Creating an attractive style, user-friendly interface, and affordable custom design is the work assigned to this position.

Software Developers

These software development specialists are front-end and back-end programmers.

The front-end developers create the visible part of the product:

• Layout
• Client programming
• Performance optimization

Back-end programmers handle the server-side of the products and are involved in the project and its requirements from the planning stage to the release.

QA Specialists

QAs need to check the application for errors and bugs at each step of the software development road.

The QA specialists are tasked with bringing the projects to the market task without any tech problems.

DevOps Experts

They work with software development teams and QA specialists to coordinate the development and operation of the product as well as build a comfortable condition for testing the project requirements.

Since 2018 software development experts in all industries have been in demand. The newest Coursera study in 2021 shows that Ukraine is in a leading position among the top offshore countries with 96% of the global skills index.

Source: Sloboda Studio, Coursera, MoneyHowStuffWorks, BizTips

What Are the Main Benefits of Hiring Dedicated Development Teams?

Many companies have heard about the significant advantages of having a dedicated software team model for outsourcing project development. Based on our 11 years of experience, we will explain each of the benefits in detail:

Cost-efficient

When entrepreneurs hire a dedicated development team, projects will benefit from greater cost-effectiveness by choosing to use outsourcing. This allows businesses the opportunity to hire a dedicated development team from anywhere in the world. An important point to know is which countries are the best for outsourcing their development. 

Let’s imagine that the company is from the USA or Europe. A developer’s cost rate varies from $100 to $150 per hour. However, if entrepreneurs look at specialists from Eastern Europe who are just as qualified, work in a competitive environment, know English well, and are ready for continuous development, they can save about $100 per hour (the in-house team can’t) in some cases. 

More than 70% of the world’s companies have announced significant savings in their budget by outsourcing parts of their business processes to a software development team. Businesses, in turn, can spend the time they saved on hiring to find partners for projects and secure profitable investments.

Easy to Manage

Business owners can hire a project manager together with the developers’ software team or manage them on their own.

In either case, the owner of the company can adjust the size of the group and the timing of their work. 

Businesses need always to be aware of everything that is happening during the development and management process. However, this should not lead to the business owners being tied up in routine work and other time-consuming tasks. Project Managers are a perfect compromise because they serve an intermediate link in the management and report on the work as it is completed. 

The whole management activity is transparent without requiring the constant attention of the business owners, thus freeing them up for other business tasks.

Focus on the Specific Task or Project

A dedicated software development team is fully committed to the project. The increased immersion in the tasks always provides the best development results.

Being at 100% product focus helps to increase the speed of response to any project changes. In this case, the dedicated development team model is flexible enough to adjust the work plan due to the changes in current project requirements, industry performance, or budget constraints.

Better Collaboration

A dedicated team model fosters the best conditions for collaboration due to the constant feedback they receive from project managers and the company’s owner. 

By using dedicated developers team models, businesses receive transparent communication and processes, which helps to achieve their goals quickly and efficiently.

Faster Development Cycle

Since developers and other specialists are engaged with one project full-time the development cycle is faster. They are deep in the process and can produce more results by the end of the cycle.  

Expertise Access

When deciding to choose a dedicated development team model, entrepreneurs can be sure to find highly effective expertise for projects without any border limits. 

If the company’s requirements are having the best Python or Ruby developers on the team with outstanding, quality code and advanced expertise on the board, it’s not a problem to hire them.

Great Flexibility

The dedicated software team hiring model is a great way to test the flexibility of outsourcing.

By hiring an outsourcing team of specialists, you can manage them at will. If the company wants to expand the outsourcing team, just let the contractor know.

Our Norwegian client needed to create an MVP product for Salita, a B2G and B2C marketplace platform that offers access to different interpreters via video and phone conferences. 

During the cooperation, we extended the project team by adding more necessary specialists. As a result, Salita went public and raised over $2M. 

Nowadays it’s a user-friendly platform that provides an online translation service for 67 languages and has over 1,300 users per month.

Fast Scaling

One of the most accessible advantages of a dedicated development team model is scalability. The customers decide how many people to hire to develop the software from the very beginning, and they can increase or decrease the number of people in the software developers team, if necessary. 

During our experience with City Falcon, Sloboda Studio faced scaling issues at the first stage of cooperation with the already built MVP. Our goal was to extend the development team to include designers and financial analysts. 

So, City Falcon received real-time word processing with three voice assistants for support. We also created a CityFALCON scoring algorithm to identify relevant and personalized financial content. Now the company is praised by millions of users with the ability to use 30 languages.

Engagement Model Options Available for Hiring Remote Development Teams

There are three main models to hire remote developers: 

• Dedicated team
• Extended team
• Outsourced team

Dedicated Team Model

A dedicated developers team is a business model where the company hires a whole development team that is fully committed to work.

A client’s company has complete control over the development and can also extend the software team if necessary.

Extended Team Model

An extended software team model is a business model that brings together the customer’s in-house developers and remote specialists from the outsourcing supplier.

The client has complete control over the best remote talent. 

Outsourced Team Model

An outsourced team is a business model where the owners delegate their house development process to an outsourcing vendor from another country.

When businesses choose these cooperation models they need to pay attention to

• quality of the talent
• reputation of the potential vendor

However, many people still confuse the dedicated team and outsourced team models with an outstaffing model. 

One of the significant differences between a dedicated team and outstaffing is the range of services.

By hiring an outsourcing team, it helps to cover all stages of the development process, whereas outstaffing involves increasing an existing in-house team with an additional outsourcing specialist. Let’s look at everything in detail.

	Dedicated Team	Extended Team	Outsourced Team
Cooperation	Both a client and a vendor can manage a team	The client manages a team	The vendor manages a team
Control	Complete control	Complete control	Partial control
Flexibility	Quick adaptation to any project changes	Quick adaptation to any project changes	Less flexible when it comes to changing some project elements

How to Hire a Dedicated Development Team With Us

At Sloboda Studio, we have been specializing in dedicated team model cooperation for 11+ years.

We have built dedicated teams for more than 100 projects. 

As an experienced software service provider, we can say that before starting to hire a dedicated development team companies need to pay attention to these vital steps:

Defining the Tech Requirements

It is vital to evaluate the project and understand that expectations correspond to opportunities. It’s a good idea to consider: 

1. How many and what experts does the company need? 
2. What skills do the experts need to have? 
3. What is the company’s budget?

The answers to these questions will help to make a preliminary list of the requirements. In return, this will make it easier to choose the right service provider and significantly narrow down the list of business suppliers. 

Conducting Market Research

Market research is the most important stage in finding a dedicated team service provider.

It’s a good idea to make market research with such specialized platforms as Clutch or Good Films, B2B review websites on worldwide development suppliers. 

By using such platforms, it’s crucial to check these company aspects:

• Location for outsourcing
• Best outsourcing developer rates 
• Reviews
• Level of expertise
• Tech and industry focus
• General info
• Examples of best projects

Another crucial factor to consider is company growth. In most cases, good service providers tend to scale their businesses which results in the number of employees growing. If a company has increased its membership in recent years then it is developing and scaling rapidly, which means its pool of talent is wider.

Gathering a Dedicated Team

A client usually chooses and interviews team members. A vendor, in turn, offers the most suitable developers for the job. When interviewing, we advise checking for the following qualifications:

1. Level of proficiency in the necessary tech stack

2. Soft business skills and their knowledge of English

3. Projects in which the company-supplier participated and how successful the results of cooperation were.

Choosing a Vendor

This is by far the most challenging part of the process. After doing research and narrowing down a list of service providers it’s time to choose. 

We advise you to pay attention to 3 important aspects like experience, portfolio, and level of communication.

The following methods can be used for choosing a suitable vendor:

• Detailed written questionnaire
• Online meeting with a vendor
• References 

Technologies & Frameworks Our Dedicated Teams Are Skilled In

For more than 11 years, Sloboda Studio has been cooperating with various global businesses to create the best technological solutions by using dedicated teams. 

We are well aware that for the best software service provider a combination of the following three factors plays a crucial role: 

• Experience
• Qualifications
• Desire for continuous development

Below, you can check out the technologies and frameworks we often use:

3 Things to Consider Before Hiring a Dedicated Development Team

When creating your business as a long-term prospect that will bring profitable solutions, you need to know some important aspects that will significantly reduce the risks of business failure in the future.

Understanding the Software Development Processes

Understanding the development process is very crucial for every business owner. 

Companies spend a lot of money on the implementation of the product to make it as efficient as possible.

To save money at the initial project stage, businesses can use the Discovery Phase to:

• Receive a deep analysis of the idea
• Check product requirements and profitable solutions
• Predict any possible challenges in the development process

When the Discovery Phase is finished, companies can start their development and create an MVP product to:  

• Enrich the project with core functionality
• Release the product to the market much earlier than competitors
• Get useful feedback from users after the product is released to the market
• Present the project to investors

Business owners have an opportunity to create a dream product. It’s wrong to think that creating an MVP product takes a little time. It is necessary to take into account the actual timing. On average, the development of the project takes three months or longer.

During our long-term development practice, there were cases when we had to cut the work so that a client could pitch the product to investors. Our client Moovle, the Belgian rental marketplace, asked for creating an MVP at the idea stage. We assembled a team of five people in the shortest possible time: 

• 2 back-end developers
• 2 mobile developers
• 1 project manager 

As a result of our partnership, Moovle was turned into a working project just only six weeks.

Learning What Your Experts Can Do

An experienced service provider will help you assemble the best team of experts. In turn, business owners need to understand

• scope of responsibility of each talent
• level of work

It is not worth hiring two employees if one is enough for the project. 

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos believes that no matter the size of your company, the developers’ team need not contain more people that can be fed by two pizzas. 

The idea of the “two pizzas” model, invented by Bezos, has proven its effectiveness in information technology. Dedicated teams of up to 10-12 people turned out to be much more efficient than large ones. Coordination of the team of more than 12 people cost rate is higher. As a result, individual productivity decreases in larger teams.

Getting a Detailed and Transparent Contract (Ask for NDA if Needed)

There are several ways to reduce potential risks when hiring a dedicated team model. One of which includes signing a contract called NDA. As a rule, companies are listed in the contract and include financial retribution in case of any trouble.

Sum it Up

The world is developing along with an attractive business model entrepreneurs can follow. If an entrepreneur has an exciting idea, it will be most effective to hire a dedicated development team.

Dedicated developers can provide 100% focus on the project. 

Nowadays, the hiring process can be challenging for businesses if they do it alone. However, with the help of an experienced software provider, the hiring can be as easy and comfortable as possible.

Our advice is to try off-shoring software development with an experienced team that can deliver an advanced product on time.