How to Extend your SaaS Development Team and Speed Up the Development Process

February 14, 2023

According to this study, the global business process outsourcing market was valued at $245.9 billion in 2021. Today, the Compound Annual Growth Rate is projected to be 9.1% between 2022 and 2030. This growth is characterized by various factors, including a rising focus on improving business efficiency, the overall flexibility of this market, and lowering operational costs.

On the other hand, the IT services market is currently experiencing a serious decline along with a looming recession. This is evidenced by the fact that large companies reduce the number of in-house specialists and reduce expenses on developing software that shows an income down drift. The amount of money that investors are willing to invest in new IT solutions is also decreasing. In such conditions, involving designers, QA engineers, and programmers from a third-party provider to scale up your in-house team can be an effective way to reduce development costs.

We made this article just to help you figure out how to find and hire specialists competent enough to meet both the needs of your customers and the company philosophy. We will itemize the key ways to scale your product development department, simplifying this process for your company.

Why Do You Need to Extend Your IT Department?

Scaling of the technical team and the staff extension, in general, is closely related to the overall organization of operational processes within the company. Assessing the current state of personnel in your company will help you understand whether you need to carry out such an expansion now.

Along with your company’s growth, you must extend your development department by engaging proficient experts with advanced technical and soft skills. When your marketing team can generate demand beyond your company’s current capabilities, your business needs to scale. Always keep in mind that the quality of your services depends on the qualifications of your employees.

We can highlight the following distinct reasons why SaaS companies are looking to expand their software development teams:

  • To speed up the market launch of a SaaS product.
  • To cover growing customer requests in your service.
  • To improve the overall performance of your service and add new features due to increased user demand.
  • To reduce the development resources cost.

Extended Vs Dedicated Teams: The Key Differences

In the current environment when the software market proceeds to grow rapidly, qualified professionals are still in short supply. That’s why the CEO, CTO, and the VP of Products are looking for the most appropriate ways to build effective specialists for each software project. Typically, managers choose between software development team extension (TE) and dedicated team (DT) models to staff the development process with qualified employees.

Here we’ll compare both TE and DT models and identify their key differences and the features they provide for SaaS providers.

Dedicated Team

Hiring dedicated teams is often a universal solution providing pre-assembled specialists ready to work on various software projects. Given this feature, the involvement of a dedicated development team does not always accommodate the specifics & requirements of a particular project. Dedicated teams, as usual, work remotely and keep in touch with the client via a Project Manager.

Team Extension

When it comes to extending the client’s in-house development team, the outsourcing agency does more than just provide employees. As a rule, along with the personnel, the contractor also supplies the equipment and other resources required for smooth SaaS product operation. The outsourcing agency creates a new department with all the necessary infrastructure for the entire development period. The ET provider manages resources, strategy development, project implementation methods, team management, etc. The service customer is only engaged in setting project tasks and tracking their effective implementation.

Team ExtensionDedicated Team
TermsVia the TE model, teams are generally hired on a long-term basis.Dedicated teams are usually provided for a short-term period.
Specialists quantityForming extended teams starts from a single specialist.Dedicated teams usually start with three specialists.
Cooperation with the client’s in-house teamExtended teams work closely with the in-house team and are well integrated into the app development process.Dedicated teams work exclusively on the client's projects or their part. They are usually more detached from the in-house employees than extended teams.
Onboarding time and team integrationOnboarding time usually takes at least two weeks.Onboarding time often takes less than a week.
Management and supervising sideAn extended team works primarily on a client's side.Dedicated teams can work on both sides.
Responsibilities to project successAn extended team takes only partial responsibility for a short time.A dedicated team takes full responsibility for a software project.
Service rangeUnder the team extension model service range is limited to a client's team capacity.The service range of a dedicated team is defined individually according to the project requirements.

The Key Benefits of Scaling Your In-house Development Team

Let’s define what benefits your company may get from a well-organized software development team extension.

Speeding up the time-to-market
When you hire dedicated developers in your company, it usually takes them time to learn and adapt to your particular software, equipment, and project specific. At the same time, working via the extended team model, you get already skilled and qualified specialists equipped with their hardware and software, which significantly speeds up the development process and saves you time.

Keeping your focus on core business operations
By outsourcing complex processes to the engaged SaaS software development team, your company can focus on the core business operations and forward all resources to meet the daily company needs and their development.

Reducing labor expenses & development costs
For any business, cost optimization is important, as this directly affects the profitability of the business. Working via the extended team model reduces the cost of payroll, insurance, taxes, and employee training, as well as the purchase of additional software and equipment. According to some studies, on average, a company can save about 60 percent of operating costs with this model.

Skills improvement of your in-house specialists
Collaborating with highly qualified and experienced specialists worldwide, your staff members will gain new knowledge and experience, as well as expand the set of technologies and tools to create software. Through this partnership and new experience, companies get options to improve the quality and complexity of future projects, scale their business, and grow faster than competitors.

A Few Tips to Extend a SaaS Development Team Efficiently

To expand your team effectively while improving your SaaS solution, we’ve listed a few important tips that you should follow:

Hire the right people
Сhoosing members of an extended team, you need to determine not only the technical role of each specialist, but also to conduct an in-depth analysis of soft skills, create competency matrices for recruiters to use, and establish an explicit hierarchy in the team.

Define clear goals and objectives
For better results, set clear goals, objectives, KPIs, etc. for each team member. That’ll help you understand and evaluate their effectiveness in a better way.

Find the right staffing agency
Define criteria for your extended team supplier partner so they can guarantee the exact level of staff and infrastructure that suits your business needs.

How to Find a Reliable Staff Augmentation Company?

When choosing an extended team provider, go by the agency’s experience and the technical level of their specialists. Generally, experienced companies go behind a specific software project and its staff requirements carefully to build an extended technical team based on them. Such teams already offer experienced and well-coordinated experts, which significantly speeds up entering the project and working on it further. Also, reliable staff augmentation companies already provide all the necessary equipment and software tools to assure an effective working process.

The Mbicycle agency has cooperation experience both via the dedicated and extended team models. Thanks to this experience and our extensive personnel reserve, you can hire highly qualified developers, designers, and engineers to exactly match your needs and specific project requirements. Our team always provides ongoing support during the development process and even after it, which will help you avoid any pitfalls and uncommon issues.

Frequently Asked Question

  • What is an extended development team?

    An extended development team is a group of specialists, provided by a third company to work on a specific project until its completion. Hiring a remote extended team can effectively compensate for skill gaps in a company's in-house staff.
  • Does Mbicycle provide qualified experts?

    The Mbicycle company has operated for more than 6 years in the IT service market. During this time, we've elaborated mechanisms for outsourcing our qualified experts via both models — ET and DT. When expanding the client's team, we always provide all the necessary infrastructure, including hardware and software for each specialist. We carefully study a client's current project and in-house staff just to pick the most appropriate outsourcing model and allot specific employees.
  • How to extend your software development team?

    There are several most common ways to extend a software development team, as follows:
    • Training your in-house employees
    • Hiring freelance developers
    • Getting several qualified experts from a vendor agency
    • Hiring a full-fledged software development team from a company provider
    • Extending your in-house team with qualified experts remotely
  • What makes an extended development team great?

    High-end development teams understand the specific technical challenges they face, such as software performance, bug-free operation, and scalability. They skillfully assess the project value for the client's business and therefore responsibly approach their work. Also, qualified engineers, designers, and programmers are always learning and implementing new technologies and tools to improve the efficiency of their work.
Pavel Zubov
Digital Marketing Expert
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