How to choose and hire a dedicated development team
Building a technology product requires a skilled development team. As an entrepreneur or business leader, hiring the right developers is crucial for bringing your ideas to life and building a successful product. However, finding and assembling a dedicated development team with the proper expertise can be challenging.
This guide will walk you through the key steps for choosing and hiring a dedicated development team that fits your needs. We’ll cover:
- What a dedicated development team is and when you need one
- How to choose a software development team based on skills, experience and culture fit
- Best practices for assessing dedicated teams through their experience, specialization and references
- Key considerations when starting work with an outsourced team
- Tips for building an effective working relationship with your developers
Follow this advice to build a development team that can handle your project needs and support your product through launch and beyond.
What is a dedicated software development team?
A dedicated development team like SPD-Technology refers to developers who are assembled by a third-party provider to work exclusively on your software project. They function as an extension of your in-house staff.
Here are the key attributes of dedicated developer teams:
- Exclusively assigned to your project – They don’t juggle multiple clients and can focus fully on building your product.
- Works under your management – While technically employed by another firm, the team takes direction from your leadership and product managers.
- Scalable model – You can ramp team size up and down as needs evolve.
- Wide range of specializations – Build fully cross-functional groups spanning front and back-end code, QA, UX and more.
Dedicating an entire squad of developers to your product for its lifecycle can provide deeper focus and ownership compared to staff augmentation models. This leads to better quality code and product familiarity.
When do you need to hire a dedicated software development team?
Here are common situations where building a dedicated development team makes sense:
Expanding internal capacity
If your in-house development bandwidth falls short of your product roadmap needs, dedicating an external team is an efficient way to scale. They integrate seamlessly under your management while avoiding high fixed costs.
Launching a new product
Building a team from scratch to flesh out a new product idea—especially if it involves complex or novel tech—carries high startup costs. An outsourced dedicated team allows you to tap specialized experts to turn ideas into reality faster.
Gain access to specific skills
Does your product vision rely on cutting-edge or highly complex tech outside your existing wheelhouse? A dedicated team brings targeted knowledge like machine learning, IoT, blockchain etc. to the table quickly.
Drive innovation
An outsourced group that works across many industries and clients can stimulate innovation. They expose your team to wider tech perspectives, best practices and new tools to incorporate.
Accelerate time-to-market
Scaling product development velocity is critical, especially for startups chasing aggressive growth. Dedicating an expert squad speeds up release cycles and feature building to beat rivals.
In summary, tapping dedicated teams makes sense for most medium-to-large-scale development projects where focused effort and specific technical skills are required.
How to choose a software development team
With many options on the market, the key is finding an outsourced technology partner that best matches your needs and priorities. Here are the most important criteria to evaluate:
Technical capabilities
The team should have proven experience building solutions using tech stacks aligned with your product plans. Review their coding languages, frameworks, databases, tools and platforms to confirm alignment.
Prioritize must-have technology proficiencies for your product. For example, React skills for front-end work, Python expertise for data projects or native mobile experience for app building.
Dig into specific examples of previous complex development work they have delivered in your problem space. This validates hands-on experience that transfers to your project.
Domain experience
While technical skills are crucial, the ideal team also has a background in your industry vertical. For example, fintech experience for a financial application or healthcare system knowledge for medical software.
This domain expertise allows them to build and enhance your product taking industry best practices, use cases, regulations and end-user needs into account.
Culture fit
The team should align culturally to enable smooth collaboration with your internal team. Assess communication norms, work style, project management methodologies and tooling for compatibility.
A start-up generally needs more agile developers used to changing priorities and tools like Slack, Trello and Git. Established enterprises may gravitate toward teams that align with existing waterfall SDLC processes.
Company size and resources
For critical long-term engagements, partnering with a large firm with abundant talent resources reduces risk. Larger providers can easily swap out team members if someone leaves and avoids single points of failure.
Mature technology partners also offer deeper benches including support teams, technical architects, DevOps engineers, security specialists and UX designers to augment the dedicated developers.
How to start working with outsourced developers
In 2024, the market for IT outsourcing is expected to generate $541.10 billion in revenue. By 2029, revenue is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.48%, reaching a market volume of US$812.70 billion. It’s a thriving market where you’ll find a lot of offers.
Once you have aligned expectations through the evaluation process and signed a contract, here are the best practices for kicking off an engagement smoothly:
Schedule an in-depth project launch meeting
Bring together leadership from both sides to discuss strategic vision, define priorities, set schedules, and determine working rhythms.
Align on communication norms, establish key contacts, demo existing code and systems, select initial tasks and talk through technical approaches.
Document action items and open questions to create transparency upfront.
Introduce tools and internal teams
Give access to all systems and documentation required for developers to rapidly ramp up. Set up accounts on collaboration platforms like JIRA, Trello, Slack, GitHub and more.
Schedule intro sessions with product owners, architects and key team members that the external team will work alongside.
Define specifications thoroughly
Leave no detail unspecified when handing off design docs, user stories or tickets to the team. Call out all requirements and expected deliverables upfront.
Offer sandbox environments and test cases for them to build against to reduce ambiguities.
Assign a technical liaison
Appoint an internal resource like a solutions architect or technical product owner to provide guidance.
This gives developers an escalation contact for queries and helps them navigate your systems and codebase conventions.
Review early and often
Schedule regular check-ins as tasks get completed to provide early feedback. This allows the team to calibrate quality and expectations before downstream dependencies kick in.
Offer comments on code quality, testing thoroughness, documentation sufficiency etc. while priorities are still fresh.
Summary
Assembling a dedicated software development team allows you to accelerate critical projects while tapping specialized expertise. Align goals and workflow early while evaluating competencies thoroughly to find an optimal technology partner.
Managing distributed teams does take leadership commitment, tight collaboration and clear communication. However, the model unlocks immense scaling capacity and talent access advantages.
With rigorous vetting and onboarding, outsourced dedicated developers can become invaluable contributors over the long term. Treat them as integral internal team members and they will help propel product innovation and continuity.