How to integrate an offshore dev team into your business

You are running your business, and now it’s time for you to find a software team. How to work with those guys and what to expect from them? Let’s try to find out.

Types of our partners’ problems

There are 5 common issues business owners usually come to us (see if you can relate to any):

1. You have an existing business, and you have an existing digital product in place, which is somehow supported. But it's already outdated from the user experience side and from the technology side, and you want to breathe a new life into it. So you need to make some changes to update it, therefore you look for some team that can bring a new technology into your business.
2. Your product fits the market, but your ambition is higher than your current technical team capability. It doesn't mean that your team is bad, or its members don't want to move along with you. But that might mean that you just don't have the time to wait until your current team will learn everything they require for that.
3. You have a product and a team, but you are not satisfied with deliverables they produce. It happens when you have just a few developers in your team, and you don't have an appropriate product manager or product owner who cares about everything and synchronizes it with each other. Money is burning and results are not coming, so you are not satisfied.
4. Your product is great, but you have too many third-party dependencies. And when the product grows, a big chunk of money goes to the third-party vendors. Maybe this is the right time to invest some money into replacing the third-party vendors with your own and point that cash flow to your pocket instead of theirs.
5. You have an existing business, and you want to digitalize it to make it easy for your employees or for your customers. For example, you want to develop a fully new management system for your employees to rise efficiently and raise your ROI. Or you want to create some application for your end customer.

How we work

Of course, the way we work with different types of problems is individual in any case, but there is still some general flow.

It all starts with researching, analysing and planning. This phase is actually required to onboard the team and to explain to them how your business works, what your goals are and what objectives you have, so they can deliver you a good solution.

During this stage you have to understand that we won't do the actual work of coding, designing or wherever, we just make the preparation. People such as business analysts and technical architects are usually involved on this stage.

Depending on the business specific, there can be additional professionals involved, such as designers, blockchain specialists if you need such, and other engineers. From your side, all the stakeholders should be involved.

Business analyst’s responsibility here is to understand all your stakeholder’s wishes, your business objectives and goals, and to find problems which currently exist. And from the technical point of view, there’s a technical engineer, an architect, who makes analysis of your code base.

So he needs access to your code, in case you have something ready, to understand what is developed and how, what architecture it has, how it all works together, and, most importantly: how it can be synchronized with our new requirements.

After analyzing everything, we come up to you with ideas. And it’s the time for you to make a hard decision.

Because we can tell you, for example, that we believe it will be cheaper (more cost-efficient, faster) to just leave everything as it is and start something new from scratch, or we can tell you that we will leave the base of what you already have and develop a new project or improve the design etc.

So, we have few options, and you have to choose which one you actually want.

And, the next step is allocating a team. Your team has to deliver the quality from the technical point of view, and do the right things to achieve business goals as well. They will give you some estimation on a budget, but still it won’t be a final amount of money, as things may change.

Of course, we give predictions and always have a plan, but our job then is to adjust that plan to reality every day. And it’s very important what processes your team will use. If you want to find out more, make sure to listen to our new podcast. We also recommend you to check our previous podcasts and articles about how to choose a development partner.