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How To Find An Absolutely Amazing Outsourced Team
Jared Neutel
March 30, 2024
When I tell people that I run a senior staff augmentation agency, I often hear one of the following …
a) “Senior staff augmentation - cool! But uhhhh what’s that?”
b) “That’s awesome! We need to talk.”
c) “Ahhh. We tried to outsource our app development and it did NOT work.”
d) “So are all your developers based in India?”
More specifically we are senior software designers and developers who augment your product and development teams, allowing you to seamlessly scale up or down with your development and business needs.
A lot of people have heard of tech outsourcing - hiring developers and designers from outside the U.S.
And a lot of people have tried to outsource their tech and not been particularly happy with the results.
That’s because there’s an art to putting together an amazing outsourced team. It’s not just a matter of going on Fiverr and paying someone $2000 to design your Wordpress website.
After working in tech for 10+ years, building our team to 100’s of employees, and building some incredible relationships with companies, we know a thing or three about building great outsourced teams. In fact, we eat, sleep, and breathe it. Read on for our best tips!
1. Have a VERY clear understanding of your needs
The best way to get your needs met is to …clearly communicate those needs. This seems obvious, but lots of companies just know that they “need help getting their product to market.”
That’s awesome! We can absolutely help you do that. The process of meeting your needs will be much more enjoyable for everyone if we’re extremely, extremely clear on what your needs actually are.
Questions we ask our clients when determining their needs so we can help them build their outsourced team:
What problem are you trying to solve?
Do you need somebody who’s just going to perform small tasks, like a quick integration or build a small modal on your app?
Do you need somebody who can build things from scratch? Or someone who will help you maintain an existing platform? (Some engineers exclusively are effective building and some are far more effective maintaining)
Do you need somebody that is going to help you flesh out your product ideas?
Do you need somebody that's going to help you go from zero to one?
Or do you already know what you want and need, you already have a functioning product, and you just wish you could clone your senior developer?
What kind of work culture do you have?
Do you have a culture of having lots of meetings with the engineers during the day?
Or do you have a culture of everyone having a quick stand up meeting in the morning and then doing their own thing?
When you can answer these questions, you are a million times more likely to get a team that feels good to work with and helps you get where you want to go.
2. Understand what phase of business you’re in
We’ve got clients in all different phases of development; understanding which phase they’re in helps us build the best team possible. You wouldn’t give a 16-year-old who just got their license keys to a Ferrari, right?
Typically, our clients are in one of five phases with their business:
Going from 0 to 1: You know the problem and need help building the solution
Maintenance: You’ve solved the problem and you want to make sure it says solved
Growth: You know the problem, know the solution, you just need more people
Enterprise: You’ve got a huge system you can never redo, that’s too big to fix, and you need help fixing things as they break
Legacy systems: You can have an existing system that needs to be checked regularly