The Secret to Building a Dream Offshore Development Team and Success

Select a Hiring Model

The hiring model plays a significant role in determining the efficiency, cost, and success of your project. As mentioned above, both freelancers who work independently and remote teams from offshore development companies are considered approaches to offshore development. If you choose freelancers to work on your future projects, things go easy as they are individuals working independently. However, if you choose a remote development team, you are required to take an extra step to choose your specific hiring model, including a dedicated development team, project-based model, or staff augmentation.

Choosing which hiring model can be challenging if you lack understanding of them, and making the wrong decision can lead to inefficiencies, increased costs, and resource misallocation. So, what are they actually?

Here are some common hiring methods when approaching offshore development:

Start with a Trial Project

The truth is, you can’t determine the right match until you give it a try. However, immediately signing a partnership with a large project is quite risky. Instead, you can entrust the offshore development team with smaller projects before committing to a long-term partnership as a small test for future partners.

Through trial projects with real-world tasks, you efficiently evaluate the developers’ capabilities and the quality of their work and working style. This is also an ideal solution to help businesses with strict budget allocation test the waters without committing significant resources upfront and avoid costly mistakes. A successful testimonial is the basis for customers to be confident in the decision to hire any offshore team, making it easier to commit to a strong working relationship.

Negotiate Terms and Contracts

Ending an offshore hire with well-formed contracts is a must to ensure the transparency of any partnership. Such legal documents should be discussed and agreed upon by both parties to avoid unnecessary conflicts during the cooperation process. If the contract contents are unsuitable or lack essential points, you have the right to provide comments and additions with the partner’s acknowledgment.

Remember, besides the contents about the scope of work, how ownership of intellectual property is guaranteed is especially important, as it helps protect sensitive information and ensures that the offshore team adheres to your security protocols.

To create a complete software development contract, you can refer to this article.

Consider Budget Constraint

Realizing the significant benefits of offshore software development services in promoting operational and product efficiency, an increasing number of businesses are turning to offshore developers as the primary driving force for the success of their software projects. A large number of offshore software development companies have been established in recent years to serve this growing demand. This is both an opportunity and a challenge for customers seeking suitable services.

As newcomers in the playground, many businesses easily make the wrong choice when placing their trust in remote dev teams with pricing models that are “too good to be true.”

Instead of choosing to use services based on price alone, focus more on your potential outcome in the future corresponding to the price. Is this investment good value for money? Cheap quotes may be beneficial in the initial phases. However, you may end up paying more at the end of the software development project due to reasons such as hidden costs, quality issues, scalability problems, etc. It is advised to focus on cost-efficient solutions whose pricing models fit your budget constraints.

Assess Technical Expertise

A team of offshore developers with good technical skills is all you need to make a successful software project. Technical expertise is a set of necessary skills and experience that a certain business expects from its future employees in order to meet the project’s requirements. By assessing the technical skills of candidates through interviews and tests, you have a basis for evaluating and verifying the true capacity of developers, ensuring that they are the missing pieces for delivering expected project outcomes and a strong return on investment.

The advice is to select personnel that best fit the needs and specializations of the project instead of focusing on full-stack developers who have broad knowledge in many areas. There is no denying that gathering dedicated full-stack developers is an efficient way to provide versatility and reduce the need for multiple hires; such a decision is often only suitable for small projects or rapid development. When quality and precision in a specific domain are critical, specialists can ensure that the work likely meets high standards.

Check Portfolios and References

Don’t forget to check your potential candidates’ portfolios to ensure they have experience in your industry with similar projects and contact previous clients to ask for their references and measure their satisfaction.

What offshore developers express in interviews may or may not be true. That’s why businesses need to verify what they share through concrete evidence, or what we call proof of work. While portfolios are the quickest way for you to directly assess developers’ technical expertise and the quality of their work, references provide insights into a developer’s reliability and their work attitude in previous projects.