What Kind Of Outsourcing Is Needed For Product Development At Different Phases Of Product Maturity

Innovative development outsourcing helps IT products take off faster, with lower risk and lower costs. At the same time, at different phases of product development, other outsourcing formats are more effective.

MVP: Outsourcing Of Individual Projects Or Modules

Product development always starts with the hypothesis that a specific market and functionality needs to be done, which can be valuable.

At the start, while there is no investment and a large team of your own, it is profitable to outsource a team to run faster.

First, we outsourced the front end. The key things – the most challenging things in the cloud – are the backend and infrastructure. If you hire your frontend team, you need management and technology support. This is a difficult task.

We decided to focus on the critical hypothesis: it will be possible to create a backend with the required performance, so we outsourced the frontend team. We worked in this mode for about six months.

Life hacks :

1. To completely outsource a module or process is the easiest option.
2. When there are few resources, a fixed-price contract is beneficial, that is, an agreement for a certain amount, according to which the team does specific tasks at a particular time.
3. A third-party team can be controlled to some extent, but you just have to hope that the outsourcers will not be two or three times late and deliver the product with standard quality.

Formation Of A Business Model: Integration Of An Outsourcing Team Into A Project, Outstaffing

Later, we confirmed the hypothesis; we created a working backend and realized that we were ready to move on. In this situation, frontend outsourcers became a risk factor: we could not fully control them, delaying launching a product on the market.

For the control to be there, the front-fenders needed to be included in our team. We built them into a scrum team that unites backend and frontend specialists; that is, we switched to the outstaffing format. This makes it faster to communicate, change requirements, scale hypotheses and develop new functionality easier. This stage, when the outsourcing team was integrated into the project, took about a year.

Life hacks :

1. At this stage, a new role is needed in the project – a person who monitors the loading of specific developers’ loading plans to reserve them for us with their company.
2. The outsourced team should be built into the work on the project and trained. It is also a valuable experience for outsourcers; they see how work processes are arranged in VK. Thus, we build an outsourcing system for long-term work, show contractors why it is profitable to work with us, keep a supply of resources for us, work in a team format.

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