When Does It Make Sense to Outsource your Web or Mobile App Development?
So you’re trying to develop your application/software product while managing your growing business and everything that comes with it.
Instead of putting more stress on yourself and your business, it may be a good idea to lighten your workload and outsource your software development to an outside software development company from Central Europe that not only will help you save on costs but give you much more possibilities. Here are some examples of situations when it makes sense to actually do it.
1. YOU WANT TO GAIN MORE TIME
You may have found yourself in a situation where your company is developing fast and your team is busy enough maintaining the existing functionalities, but you have a head full of ideas for the new ones.
Or you are starting to build your product and you need your MVP to be built fast and cost-efficient to show potential customers and investors.
Either way, your time is limited, there is a pile of work growing on top of maintaining your customer’s queries, fixing bugs, working on marketing, growing customer base, etc. and still, you have lots of ideas how to make your product better, faster, friendlier, simpler with features none have yet thought of.
The competition doesn’t sleep, a week has only 7 days, and you already burn the midnight oil more often then it is considered healthy.
Finding the right software development agency to outsource your application development may seem scary and time-consuming at first, but you should come out ahead in this investment with all of the time and energy it will save you once everything is set up.
By freeing up more of your time and outsourcing your software development you can pursue other avenues of creating a better product. Outsourcing your software product development allows you to get your product to market faster.
This means you will receive faster feedback, enabling you to quickly adapt and change your product to make it more compatible with the customers’ requests.
In addition, experienced developers working in remote teams might see these problems in advance allowing you to fix a problem without your customers ever knowing that it existed.
When you outsource the work like developing web platform, mobile applications, systems, etc. to an experienced development company you not only save the time but also you gain the experience of the people that will work for you. They most probably have already worked on a similar project or have developed similar features before and may suggest solutions that you were not even aware they existed.
2. YOU WANT TO LEARN ABOUT DIFFERENT POSSIBILITIES
If you are not an active software developer yourself, there is a great possibility you are not even aware of all the technological advantages you can use in your product that could enhance its performance, the way it is developed, scalability, etc. Without constantly updating technological skills and knowledge choosing the right technology or a framework to work within may be a shot in the dark. There are so many options both for back-end and front-end.
What do you pay attention to while choosing the technology? Well, for sure you want to stick to the technology that is well documented and constantly developed by a wide society of developers around the world.
Great application development companies also take advantage of open source solutions that shorten the time of development of specific features that your product needs.
Smart engineers don’t want to reinvent the wheel and will happily choose a proven solution that is much cheaper and faster to implement than to create something similar from the beginning.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule and when it happens that you need something special, they will not try to force using an existing solution if it doesn’t fit the bill.
The key to success is to match the proper technology to the specific need, not the other way around. It is like choosing a size of a gift box. Firstly you have the gift and then you buy/match the box that fits.
3. YOU WANT TO GAIN RELIABLE ASSISTANCE
There may be a technical debt in your product that you are not sure how to cure. The system is clunky, work is getting slow, your employees are frustrated because of the time wasted due to the inefficiency of the platform they work within.
Should you rewrite everything from scratch? Continue developing the old code? Or maybe rewrite and refactor the system part by part?
It may be a pretty pickle to choose the right option, but with the right software company, you will be able to choose what’s most convenient solution both for you and the developers who will spend their precious hours developing your product.
The application agency can assist you at every step of your technological decisions. Remember, once you start working together, they will care for your app as it was theirs, especially if it is a smaller development agency.
It is much easier for them to keep a long and happy relationship with one client than to look constantly for new ones. Therefore, they will bend over backwards to make you happy. All of the IT companies from Central Europe are hungry for success and recommendations. Word of mouth is the most valuable marketing tool.
Are you worried if the in-house team will be able to cooperate easily with a team from outside? Every professional development agency cares for the code to be written in an internationally standard way, so it is easy for another coder to jump in quickly into the project. It is important to ask about that before deciding on who to work with.
4. YOU WANT TO STOP LOSING MONEY
It is a standard practice for companies that want to save on costs outsourcing their development to Poland. It is a win-win situation for both sides. You develop your app for cheaper, and ambitious developers get to work on interesting applications treating the products as it was their own. The fact they work on many different projects in a year keeps them enthusiastic and motivated. No one likes monotony, right?
Remember, hiring experienced team allows you to create a more polished product in a fraction of the time it would take to do it yourself or to hire your own developer or team and of course for less money.
By discussing potential problems with initial customers and the programmers themselves you can rest assured that you will be able to stand behind your product when it hits the market and fix any remaining issues that may arise.
5. YOU WANT TO WORK WITH A SELF-MANAGED AND RESPONSIBLE TEAM
The advantage of a software development company is that you have all services included in the price of the development.
Project management, design, programming, testing, UX, UI, you name it. There is no need to look for single individuals to do everything separately, where a team of people who likes to work together is ready to rise to the occasion of developing something you exactly want.
Offshore technological partners will often go to extreme ends to deliver the exact product you want without having to be micromanaged. They want to create a great reputation and be able to show prospective clients a list of satisfied customers that can attest to their quality.
It stands to reason that communication is key to all successful projects. To be on the safe side with the direction of your app development, always specify how would you like the communication to be during the process. There is a handful of ways of communication you may choose from that will keep you up to date with every step.
Working with a remote team creates an “open door” atmosphere that will allow you to receive updates on progress without being overbearing. For instance, one way to do this would be creating a type of checklist on a shared document that allows you to tell the development company exactly what you want while allowing you to see their progress.
Another way to remain in the loop about developments and problems is to request to be CC’ed on all communications regarding your project. This way you can monitor the progress and see potential problems without always having to coordinate updates and meetings with your project manager.
You should also specify how often the updates on the work done would you like to receive. They may be in a form of a report sent after each day of work that you will discuss on a weekly call with the Project Manager of the team.
Just to name a few tools that application development companies use to make their processes transparent and the communication with you effective: Jira Software - tracks the time spent on the project and creates reports, Slack/HipChat - enables real-time communication between you and the team, Trello - helps with project management and project tracking, Google Docs - uused for checklists, file storage - all to be on the same page, Skype/Hangouts - video calls, conferences, Confluence - allows for content collaboration.
Using these tools will save your time and will help you avoid unnecessary micromanaging and stress, allowing you to focus your talents and abilities elsewhere, like gaining new customers or coming up with a new way to improve your product.
Important note: Don’t be afraid to give an honest and straightforward feedback on the work. The team you will work with will certainly appreciate your openness.
6. YOU DON'T WANT TO EXPERIMENT IN HIRING
You know how hiring individuals works. Collecting resumes, scheduling interviews, viewing past projects, examining knowledge... Once you find your potential candidate after you settle on a salary and describe what you would like him/her to do, they may decide to leave and go work for another firm sending you back to square one and having to start the whole process all over again.
When you finally have your dream team in-house, you need to mentor the employees and keep challenging them to make you team stay motivated and committed.
In the times where so many companies fight to get the best developers, you need to know exactly what will make them want to work for you. Talented developers need constant challenges and a sense that they are creating something valuable.
They care for their work hours to be filled with different tasks to constantly develop their skills. They also need guidance from other, more experienced developers, CTOs who they can look up to.
Outsourcing your development allows you to forego all of this potential trouble and avoid bringing new full-time employees onto staff.
This frees up more capital for you and gives you the benefit of working with a team who is dedicated to your project and won’t leave for new work.
Having a team also decreases the amount of time that you need to get your product to market, which allows you to save more money. This mitigates your risk in the long term allowing you to spend more time managing your customer base or marketing your product instead of having to waste valuable time reading resumes and conducting interviews.
If you want to see what are the other companies experiences with the company you want to hire, just go to Clutch.co. Independent interviews given by the previous customers of the companies listed on the platform will give you an insight of what you may expect from the company you plan to hire.
YOU MUST FOCUS ON WHAT'S IMPORTANT
Beyond all question, the biggest challenge of a CEO is knowing what to focus at the moment. Having too much on your plate is a bad situation, both for you and your business. At some point, you have to delegate projects to other people and trust them they will deliver exactly what you want for your business. Maybe the time to do it is now?
