Here’s how you nail outsourcing your app to an external team of developers
So, your app idea is good to go. The business plan is ready and you can’t wait to get to that minimal viable product (MVP) that you can already envision on your phone’s home screen. You probably also feel like there’s no time for recruitment before others come up with a similar “Airbnb for wearables” or “Uber for Segways” app.
If you are a small startup and perhaps only one team member has a technical background, then you are probably facing the most typical scenario when it comes to outsourcing app development work. Or perhaps this other typical scenario sounds more familiar: a bigger company with an in-house developer who’s been working on the app for a while, but is stuck and needs external expertise.
Here’s when outsourcing your app development is a really good idea:
• You’d like to start immediately and are careful with spending. If you can’t afford fixed costs to support an in-house team and want to stay flexible at this point of time, hiring an external team will save you quite some budget, especially if development will be a one-time project.
• You’d rather not deal with people/team management at this very moment or you’d like to avoid management risks altogether. A myriad of management issues can be someone else’s headache when a well-trained team can immediately get to work for you. When hiring new technical team members like developers and designers, they do need time to get used to each other, work out their communication, approval and other processes. And you may not even want to be a people manager just yet and deal with coaching and motivating this new team.
• You are interested in tapping into multifaceted external expertise and market knowledge that a mobile development company that’s simultaneously working on apps for different industries and customers has collected over time.
Outsourcing app development work gets you immediate access to a well-trained team and with the right partner, a high quality outcome along with insights from external expertise.
However, make sure you avoid some typical mistakes that may add significant roadblocks to your experience. Through our experience we collected this list of “The Hateful Five” to fight when passing off your app “baby” to the “outsoursery (or outnursery)” of choice:
- Failing to do proper research
- Going after a good deal rather than quality experts and realistic market price
- Not defining the crystal clear rules of the game
- Failing to use best practices of project management
- Not conducting rigorous enough testing
If this sounds a bit complicated, that’s because, like any technical project, a mobile app has a lot of moving parts. When outsourcing your app development you save significant resources needed to hire in-house developers while keeping full control of your project. Outsourcing app development work gets you immediate access to a well-trained team and with the right partner, a high-quality outcome along with insights from external expertise.
The market of global outsourcing services has been growing exponentially in the last few years and top analysts even predict that very soon, demand for mobile apps will “outstrip available development capacity”. These are all good signs indicating that outsourcing app development is a great way to go if you need an app to power your business and you need it FAST.
