Hiring a Dedicated Team for a Startup: Benefits, Guidelines, and Specifics

It's almost impossible to hire the whole startup team with the required set of skills who communicate with you and with each other in the same language.

Even if you need to hire a single software engineer suitable for a certain task, finding one may take quite a lot of time and effort. At the same time, you will also have to help the new employee adapt to the team and onboard them, which may be quite difficult and time-consuming.

However, you can address this issue by turning to the dedicated teams model.

You will get a team of specialists with the required skill set to complement and expand your own team's capabilities. What's more, a dedicated team is ready to start working on your project within the shortest time possible.

We at Aspirity have dealt with numerous projects turning to a dedicated team model, one of our key services. This article will draw on the company's rich experience to explain how to hire a dedicated software development team for your startup and succeed with your project.

Except for the fact that a dedicated team model provides you with access to experienced software engineers, here are a few key pros of a dedicated team.

With a dedicated team model, you hire a whole squad of professionals. They have already gained extensive experience working together and can easily find a common language. That's why such a team is well-coordinated and ready to deliver at a high level right away.

Product designers and UX/UI designers play the key role when the project just begins. Later, their involvement declines, while the developers and QA specialists participate in the workflow more actively. A flexible dedicated team can change roles and take the initiative at a certain point whenever necessary.

A dedicated team model allows you to focus on your product's needs while the developers are working on their tasks. You don't have to worry about recruitment costs, employee retention, taxes, vacations, sick leaves, etc. The vendor copes with all these issues instead of the client. Thus, you will save time for more creative tasks that matter to your project's success.

A dedicated team is a business-oriented model that aims to adapt to certain project's needs and can work as a part of your own team. Such an approach makes you feel as if they work very close to you, in the same office, only one floor above. Though, in fact, they can be located anywhere in the world.

We at Aspirity prioritize organizing our work so that our clients feel no difference in working with their in-house employees and our dedicated software team.

To make this happen, we use the same tools, speak the same language, and adapt to the required time zones. We always immerse ourselves in the clients' business specifics. Finally, we don't just implement features but do our best to make them useful.

Our company gathers the team around two core specialists:

They ensure all necessary tech expertise and communication with the client.

The team composition always depends on the project's specifics to accelerate development speed and the quality of delivery.

A dedicated engineering team can be useful at each development phase. The vendor will complete the team's squad depending on the current stage and its specifics.

At the same time, dedicated software developers can either deal with the entire development lifecycle or become a part of your existing team. A common example is when your product manager works in-house and covers product strategy needs while a dedicated team works on product design and technical realization.

Depending on your product journey, the need for certain specialists may vary. So when building a software development team for a startup, pay attention to the following project's stages and the professionals you will probably need.

When the project just begins, the most important members are the product designer and product manager.

You may read our article about hiring a product manager for your startup for more details.

At this stage, there will be many research tests. Prototyping and building an MVP are also very likely to take place. Clickable prototypes are built in Figma to test the main features and verify if UX works well. As for creating an MVP, many startups decide to start with it to ensure the product's viability and its readiness to serve the audience's needs.

As for the tech specialists, you may need to involve a tech leader to advise on technical realization.

At this stage, the importance of the tech specialists' role significantly grows as it's critical to build the product as fast as possible.

Your team will likely involve two or three additional developers and a QA engineer to test the product regularly.

At this stage, your team will expand with new designers and software engineers. Here, it's crucial to prevent stagnation, finding the most efficient ways for your product's further growth and development with the help of useful metrics and relevant analytics.

There are various engagement models for outsourcing software development, each of which has its own benefits and may suit certain projects depending on its specifics.

So what is the difference between a dedicated team vs team extension?

The extended team model is also called an outstaffing model. It perfectly suits projects that require adding particular skills to the existing in-house team. For example, you need one software engineer to write code in React.js. Turning to the extended team model, you can hire such an employee to work as a part of your in-house team under your project manager's lead.

In the same way, you can hire three or even ten developers. The vendor often involves them as required, so they will likely be unfamiliar with each other, having no experience working together, which may result in communication barriers.

Another disadvantage of team extension, which is often overlooked, is a different teamwork experience. Some professionals may be more familiar with agile methodology in a big team, while others have worked as freelancers and never used task trackers. The lack of mutual understanding and unsettled code review process may significantly slow down the workflow at the initial development stages, reducing the quality of delivery.

However, there are a few considerable pros of software development team extension. First and foremost, such services are much more cost-efficient. The client pays exclusively for the work of the developer, QA, and designer, as if they were hired for the in-house team. The pitfall of this situation is that such a staffing model requires corresponding control, management, code review, etc., daily.

Suppose you have an experienced manager and tech expert on your side to control and guide the workflow. In that case, outstaffing can become a more cost-effective alternative to the dedicated team model.

Thus, to ensure the extended team model will be efficient and result-driven, you will need to put in quite a bit of effort regarding management and technical realization control.

The dedicated team is a more complex model. It involves well-organized professionals who have been working together for a while and are ready to deliver the result right away.

In such a team, the communication and task execution are already on the right track, so the members don't need to build them from scratch. There are many predefined workflow aspects like the team calls schedule, the task distribution depending on each specialist's strengths, the code review, bug fixes, etc. Such a team evaluates the tasks more accurately. Its members have been building and improving these processes for a long time, thanks to their rich collaboration experience.

One of the dedicated team's core goals is to adapt the processes mentioned above to the client's workflow quickly and painlessly. And although it's quite a challenging task, it's still easier than building an internal team balance from the ground up. Here, the project manager's role is critical.

Therefore, hiring a dedicated teams is more costly, but the client pays for the well-organized and balanced process. In fact, you can even save some money and effort thanks to the faster pace and higher quality of work.

On top of that, dedicated teams often use agile methodology. Thanks to cross-functionality and good self-organization, dedicated agile teams can deliver fast results and enhance productivity. Normally, such a team is relatively small and involves a few advanced specialists mentored by a scrum master rather than a project manager. Agile dedicated teams actively use metrics to monitor their performance and workflow efficiency.

Of course, when hiring dedicated developers for your project, you need to find a team with relevant expertise and the required set of skills. For that, one should prioritize the project's specifics and move on to making basic decisions.

Initially, it's a good idea to define the essentials like the project's budget and tech stack.

The budget normally depends on the product's features and their complexity, as well as the hired team's type and location. It's always great to have an opportunity to reduce development costs, especially when your startup funding is strictly limited.

The chosen technology for your frontend, backend or mobile app platform also has a significant impact. It should totally suit your app's functions. Also, when choosing the tech stack, remember that you will need to maintain and update the product after the launch, so the technology should have a vast developers' community.

Next, it's worth defining the scope of work you're going to outsource. It will directly affect the future dedicated team's skillset and setup.

Determining culture fit and communication match is a more difficult goal. These aspects aren't obvious and can't be verified right away. However, this is one of the core principles of the dedicated team model.

Culture fit is the candidate team's validation in terms of their attitudes and behaviors to ensure they will be suitable for your company's culture and core values.

Communication match is no less important as it's aimed to reveal if the client-vendor relationship will be smooth. Miscommunication is one of the most critical potential challenges, so you need to minimize this risk.

The ease of the client's interaction with the future team's tech lead and project manager is the key to fruitful collaboration and the entire project's success.

We at Aspirity prefer to start working on a project with the discovery phase. It helps us determine the project's roadmap and prioritize the tasks. If the client has already considered these aspects, it can significantly facilitate and speed up the process of building the team.

Within this preparation phase, we dive deeper into the project, learn its specifics, and discover how useful we can be to the client. In turn, the discovery phase enables our clients to verify culture fit and communication match, which is almost impossible before the project begins.

A dedicated team is one of the key services at Aspirity. This model allows us to boost our strengths and efficiently use them to help our clients succeed.

Here are the main benefits of our remote dedicated teams for startup.

The dedicated team model is a perfect way to enhance your product development and involve skillful professionals with relevant expertise. At the same time, you can significantly reduce the development costs by hiring a reliable remote partner since building a full-fledged in-house team requires considerable time and money investments.

Thus, you can access a much wider talent pool instead of recruiting and training the necessary professionals on your own. On top of that, a reliable vendor will take full responsibility for project management and any staffing nuances.

Finally, a dedicated team's extensive experience and flexibility can give your startup a significant benefit. The hired professionals can perform with such commitment as if they worked for you in-house.

Want to find a dedicated team to join you and help your startup succeed?

We at Aspirity have gained well-established experience working with numerous projects within a dedicated team structure. Our team includes experts in product design, UI/UX design, front-end development, and business analytics.

Get in touch to learn more about the dedicated team model's specifics and how it can be beneficial in your very case.

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