The biggest issue about the hiring dedicated teams
Last week passing through the new connections in my LI I’ve met an interesting conversation with a guy from London, who now works in the field of space and aircraft software development. It was just a usual small-talk with a new contact, but it makes me think about the main problem that a lot of the young entrepreneurs meet when they hire dedicated development teams. So, the guy told me that he had a very bad experience working with the dedicated team due to the poor quality of coding and communication skills of the developers. And here I’ve realized that working with different startups for the last 4 years we act mainly as the rehabilitation center for victims of poor-quality customer service. About one-half of the new clients started our negotiations describing this problem as the main point why they won’t work with dedicated teams any longer.
As the person who works on both sides of the “barricades” and runs offshore and own-product business at the same time, I quite agree with them and share all their fears. But because of my team, I know that offshore development experience can be good and pleasant, so that’s why I decided to make a shortlist of my personal experience notices that can be useful for you if you think about hiring a dedicated team.
First of all, I want to start from the very important and easy-to-maintain rule – if you hire someone, please, gain as much information about them as you can. Web-sites, decks, social profiles of the founders, past projects, Clutch reviews – all of this staff can be crucially important to understand if the team/company is reliable. Of course, this research will take you some time, but trust me – when you will hire a poor-quality team, it will cost you much more time.
Then, of course, the power of a word must be also used- its very easy for teams to hide all their experiences under NDA, but don’t be fooled by that. It’s very important to ask for the “live-reference” – someone of the past clients that will be able to share with you the experience he/she gained working with the team. Simple chatting with the past-client via email of the quick call can make you see the picture of the future cooperation clearly and will also make you understand how open and transparent the team is. And of course, look for the companies with close expertise to your product`s field. It can have you more time to find them, but the development process with these guys will be much faster, cheaper and more effective. So, choosing the company you want to work with looks through the projects that have done, try them, ask them about the amount of the work they have done in each particular project and then compare all the information with your vision of the product you want to build. As closer the expertise of the dev team will be to your product – as better will be your cooperation.
And last, but not least – pay close attention to people you will be working with. This is the main problem that a lot of the clients face – you need to understand that you will be working with this team every day to gain the excellence of your product, so you must be filling yourself comfortable interacting with them (or at least with the project manager, who will be on the regular calls and meetings with you). When we hire a new team-mates to our team we pay a lot of our efforts to gain the “right-minded-people”, so I understand how hard it can be for the client to find the right suit person, but one more time – your efforts are worth it, when we talking about the quality of your products.
This is it, nothing super-magical, or something that will make you think that the process of the team hiring is hard – but this is the super easy recipe to avoid the painful feelings about offshore development in the future. Make your best and be brave enough to make your dream product come true!
Peace and love, Anna
Co-founder HumanIT
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