Scaling Startup Success: The Benefits of Hiring a Dedicated Development Team

Until relatively recently, building a new product or launching a new service meant hiring an in-house IT team. It posed many limitations for startups and small businesses as hiring and training your own tech team requires impressive budgets and extra expertise in recruitment and HR. On top of that, you’d need to know at least some technical intricacies of the developers’ jobs to make the right choice.

The practice of outsourcing software development projects has changed many industries and businesses in general dramatically. Particularly, the dedicated development team model. Here, the collaboration is based on the customer’s goals, wishes, and requirements.

Dedicated Team Structure: How Does It Work?

Dedicated software development teams typically consist of various roles that work collaboratively. At Rocketech, many teams are already established and have worked together before. It means our professionals can start a project as soon as possible and don’t need any extra time to learn to navigate the waters between each other.

Teams are assembled according to the specific requirements of each project. For example, building a marketplace and launching a cryptocurrency exchange service require specialists in different expertise domains.

However, a standard dedicated team structure is the following.

Business Analysts

Business analysts bridge the gap between the technical team and the business stakeholders. They gather and analyze requirements, document functional specifications, create use cases, and ensure the development team understands the project objectives and user needs. Business analysts are key to aligning the technical solution with business goals and facilitating effective communication throughout the development process.

Product Owners

Product Owners represent the client or end-users within the development team. They define the product vision, prioritize features, create user stories, and communicate the project’s requirements to the team. POs act as a single point of contact for clarifying requirements, making critical decisions, and ensuring the final product aligns with the stakeholders’ expectations. In many projects, the client takes the role of a Product Owner.

UX/UI Designers

UX/UI designers are responsible for creating user-centric interfaces that are visually appealing and intuitive and enhance the overall user experience. They conduct user research, create wireframes, design prototypes, and collaborate with the development team to ensure the final product meets the target audience’s needs while aligning with the project’s goals.

Developers

• Front-end engineers specialize in developing the user-facing components of a software application. They are skilled in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript frameworks and work closely with UX/UI designers to bring designs to life. Front-end developers make the interface user-friendly, interactive, and optimized for performance across different devices and browsers.
• Back-end engineers focus on the server-side development of a software application. They are proficient in programming languages like Python, Java, PHP, or back-end frameworks and handle the logic and data processing behind the scenes. Back-end engineers design and build APIs, manage databases, and ensure secure and efficient software’s core functionality.
• Full-stack engineers possess both front-end and back-end development skills, allowing them to work on the software application’s client-side and server-side aspects. They take a holistic approach to development, handling both the user interface and the underlying systems. Full-stack engineers can contribute to various project parts, from UI implementation to database design and system architecture.
• Mobile developers specialize in creating software applications for mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. They have expertise in platforms like iOS (Swift) or Android (Java or Kotlin). Mobile developers focus on the unique challenges of mobile development — designing for different screen sizes, optimizing performance, and integrating with device-specific features.

Scrum Masters

Scrum Masters are facilitators of the agile development process. They ensure the Scrum framework is implemented effectively, guide the team in following agile principles, and organize and facilitate daily stand-up meetings, sprint planning, and retrospectives. Scrum Masters act as coaches, removing obstacles, and fostering a collaborative and productive work environment.

DevOps Engineers

DevOps engineers focus on the intersection of development and operations. They automate and streamline the deployment and infrastructure processes to ensure efficient collaboration between development and operations teams. DevOps specialists set up continuous integration and delivery pipelines, manage server configurations, monitor system performance, and address scalability and security concerns.

Quality Assurance Specialists

Quality assurance specialists ensure the software meets the highest quality and functionality standards. They design and execute test plans, perform manual and automated testing, identify bugs and issues, and collaborate with the development team to resolve them. QA professionals are the masters of verifying the software’s performance, reliability, and user-friendliness.

Building for Success: The Strategic Advantage of Hiring a Dedicated Development Team for Startups

The ultimate goal of dedicated development team services is to perform as an extension of the client’s business and take over not only the technical part of the project but also the operations and management inside the team itself. In other words, while it’s a separate and perfectly functioning organism, it’s fully dedicated to the client’s success.

We highlighted the main benefits of this collaboration model.

Access to Specialized Skills

Remember the example with marketplace and cryptocurrency exchange development? Essentially, a dedicated software development team service will provide a specialist in a narrow expertise domain. It means tackling complex development challenges with precision without going the extra mile looking for them yourself.

Domain Expertise and Innovation

Dedicated teams often have extensive experience in particular domains and industries. Let’s say an educational app and a matchmaking combat sports streaming platform exist in parallel business realities and require different expertise and approaches. Tech vendors providing this collaboration model will either have the required expertise or know where to find and onboard the specialist who has it.

Faster Time to Market

Well-established teams are experienced in efficient project execution and can help startups accelerate their time to market. By utilizing their expertise, streamlined processes, and agile methodologies, the team can ensure rapid development, testing, and deployment of the product or solution. In other words, they don’t have to reinvent the wheel — they’ve done it before.

Scalability and Flexibility

Startups often experience fluctuating development needs as their projects evolve or their user base grows. Dedicated teams can easily adjust resources and ramp up or down based on the startup’s requirements. Your project is rapidly growing, and you need to scale? Done. You haven’t got your investment and need to slow down? No problem; they will slow down with you and even help you pivot if needed.

Cost Efficiency

Startups can avoid expenses on recruitment, onboarding, infrastructure setup, and ongoing employee benefits. Additionally, the dedicated team can provide a clear pricing model, allowing the new business to have better control over the budget and allocate resources more efficiently.

Focus on Core Business

Startups can offload the development workload and focus on strategic aspects like product vision, customer acquisition, and business growth. This allows the founders and core team members to channel their energy and time toward critical areas, maximizing their productivity and impact. The point of hiring a dedicated team is finding a trustworthy tech partner who covers your gaps, takes over what you objectively cannot do, and lets you focus solely on your business.

Continuous Support and Maintenance

Launching a software product is only the beginning. Startups need ongoing support, maintenance, and updates to keep their product up to date and address user feedback. A dedicated software development team can provide ongoing support, timely bug fixes, and feature enhancements, keeping the product stable, secure, and aligned with the needs of evolving users.

Bonus: Follow the Famous Examples

Outsourcing software development is a common practice used by companies for multiple reasons, from cost reduction, niche expertise, and fresh perspectives to access to a flexible labor pool. Recognizable companies have successfully outsourced some of their development work.

1. Google, known for its employee perks, has been outsourcing tasks like AdWords support and software development since 2011. On top of that, the tech giant has been delegating some of its software development since 2014. Now the corporation has more temporary contractors and vendors than employees. It allows them to fill temporary gaps when their full-time employees take vacations or leaves, utilizing the flexibility offered by outsourcing.
2. Alibaba, the largest online retailer in China, is believed to owe its success to the support of US-based developers in the early days. It’s widely accepted that Jack Ma, the founder of the Chinese e-commerce giant, faced challenges finding app developers in China due to the scarcity of software developers and internet restrictions prevalent at that time. Jack Ma’s visionary mindset led him to hire developers from outside China to build the mobile app — a decision that ultimately propelled Alibaba to become a global success story.
3. Slack, a prominent communication channel for businesses, was initially developed as an in-house tool by a video game studio. They sought expertise and a fresh perspective by outsourcing the user interface design to MetaLab, which helped shape Slack into its successful form.
4. AppSumo, a startup founded on a $50 budget, outsourced the development of a basic MVP to connect PayPal to its website. This enabled them to quickly validate their business idea and launch with minimal resources.
5. Groove, a market-leading sales engagement platform, emerged despite its founder, Alex Turnbull, couldn’t find a tech co-founder. His expertise alone wasn’t enough for managing the development aspects of establishing a SaaS company. Having failed to find a CTO for his project, he delegated the technical responsibilities to an external firm through outsourcing. This strategic decision helped him maintain full ownership of his company while simultaneously saving costs that would have otherwise been allocated to hiring full-time employees.

Rocketech Dedicated Development Team Services

Our dedicated team model offers a flexible and adaptable approach to large, long-term projects, ensuring total commitment to your success. With a well-coordinated team, absolute control over development processes, and total transparency of project changes, you can focus on your business as we take care of recruitment, HR, and development.

Our cross-functional team of highly efficient professionals creates a balanced and goal-driven process, while our strict adherence to our six core values guarantees quality and profitability. As a Middle+ and Senior level team, we share our business expertise and advise on optimal resource planning, compliance counseling, and legal security.