Everything else aside, the app development team you hire is the single most important factor in the success or failure of your app.
Really. You could come up with the biggest idea or have the savviest marketing campaign, but for an app to turn out the way you envision it, and for it to work in the long term, you need the most talented development team working on your project. Your product is as good as the hands that build it. Period.
An average American looks at their phone 262 times a day! That’s once every 5.5 minutes. And 88% of this time is spent on mobile apps. No wonder mobile apps are the gold rush of our generation. With everyone rushing to build one, you need a truly standout team to be working on yours.
Of all the time, energy and resources you invest in your app, dedicate a good chunk of it in hiring the right app development team.
So choose your hiring model carefully. Between outsourcing app development to an external team, and hiring an in-house team, there is a middle path that works best for the largest share of startups and SMEs. Hiring a dedicated team – is the perfect solution to your app development worries.
Hiring a dedicated team – How does it work?
Hiring a dedicated team is a collaborative model that involves contacting a vendor who specializes in app development talent and has some of the best app developers you can choose from. Your (the client’s) team and the dedicated team work together for an extended period of time.
This is different from other engagement models such as fixed-cost model, app development outsourcing, or in-house team hiring.
To understand the difference, let us first take a glimpse at the other models.
In-house team
Hiring an in-house team of developers is for businesses that are tech heavy and will have a constant need for development projects. This usually is only sensible for big companies like Google and Microsoft as they are constantly developing and launching new software and apps.
The in house team stays on the company payroll as well as must be given all the other benefits, infrastructure, and more. This is a long term liability.
Most startups and small to medium businesses don’t have a long term software development requirement. Once the app is built and launched, minimal maintenance work is all that’s required. The in-house team wouldn’t have much to do when that happens. In the long run, hiring an in-house team is a high-quality but deeply expensive engagement model.
Outsourcing
Outsourcing app development is a reliable and low-cost engagement model that gives you access to a global talent pool at surprisingly affordable costs. When done properly, app development outsourcing can help you build a high quality app, as many offshore app developers tend to come out at the good end of a fiercely competitive industry. This makes them really good at their job, even if English isn’t their first language.
Outsourcing just has a few challenges, such as limited control over the projects trajectory and some communication barriers.
Hiring a dedicated team takes away these challenges and gives you an engagement model that combines the best of both in-house and outsourcing.
Dedicated team
Coming back to the topic at hand – hiring dedicated team for app development. This is like having an in-house team of your own, that follow your instructions closely, work flexibly to accommodate your feedback, and constantly keep you in the loop with the app development cycle. Just that they don’t actually take up space in your office or sit on your payroll. You pay them by the hour for each person you hire, and they work in collaboration with your existing team, to ensure complete authenticity of development.
Advantages of hiring a dedicated team
Choose your pick of the best app developers
When hiring a dedicated, you can pick out just the developers you need for your project, from a gamut of talented, experienced developers expert in a vast range of development specialties. For example, if you need native app development, you can choose an Android or iOS developer. Instead, if you need hybrid or cross platform developers, you can choose from React Native, Flutter, or Ionic experts. With that, you can even choose other specialists like your quality assurance manager, project manager, delivery manager, or anyone else you feel is needed on your team.
Hire only the best developers
If you were to hire an in-house team or freelancers for your app development, you’d have to vet each candidate personally. The recruitment process is a grueling one with interviews, background checks, and tough decisions. Some developers show skill while others sport more experience. Some lack niche expertise while others fall short on samples.
No matter how much you deliberate, choosing the right candidates is hard. And you need to do this for every single member of the team individually.
When you decide to hire a dedicated app development team, you just need to make one decision – to pick a good app company. Since they’ve already put in the heavy lifting of recruiting the best talent, you don’t have to.
Flexible and scalable teams
When you take up an app development project, it usually starts off with something small, but ideas pop up well into development and often, the scope grows as the project advances.
With a dedicated team, you can start off with a small team and scale as you go further. Scaling your project is thus easier and more cost effective with dedicated app developers.
Beat local skill shortage
The word’s best app developers tend to be concentrated around cities like New York or London. Entrepreneurs on the other hand, come from all places far and wide, and should be able to build their apps no matter where they are.
There are about 24 million developers across the world, out of which just about 4 million are in the United States of America and about 400,000 in the UK. This means that the largest share of developers is outside US and UK.
Hiring dedicated development teams allows you to access talented developers from across the world, who have worked for clients from across the world. This way, every idea gets the resources it needs. You can get access to all kinds of developers skilled in all kinds of languages and development platforms.
Cost effective and quick
Save time and money on recruiting, vetting, and interviewing developers and instead focus on growing your business while your dedicated team of developers handles the tech side of your business.
Offshore developers can cost as much as 10 times less than developers in the US or UK, and still pack in a ton of talent and experience. This price difference can mean the world when it comes to getting your business off the ground on a budget.
What you get when hiring a dedicated team
If you set out to build a mobile app from scratch, and you have no coding or programming background, you are actually going to need more than just a coder. For successful app development, you need a full-stack team consisting of the following people:
- UI/UX designer – to design the most attractive and functional interface and user experience.
- App developers – Frontend developer, backend developer, iOS, Android, Hybrid, or cross-platform developers
- DevOps Engineer – to build, maintain, and check the infrastructure to ensure efficient development
- Tech Lead – to oversee tech designs, coding, coordinating different areas of development
- Quality Analyst – someone who tests the app at multiple stages to ensure it is fully functional, smooth and bug-free
- Business Analyst – to guide the tech workflow in accordance with business goals
- Project Manager – To pull the entire team together, coordinate tasks and be your single point of contact to ensure good communication
Imagine hiring each of these individually, or outsourcing to an agency without much control on who handles what on your project.
When you hire a dedicated team, you get a perfectly well-coordinated team complete with all of these people who know each other, work well together and execute your project like a well-oiled machine.
Payment Models for hiring dedicated team
The most efficient way of paying your dedicated team is by paying every individual member on an hourly basis. This way, you can freely make sure you get as much work done as you need. Of course the app development company ensures you get in a certain minimum number of hours done in each week or month, as well as lays out a proposed delivery roadmap. Yet the hourly model makes for a flexible payment model, so you have enough room to make changes, review specs, and change direction.
Another option could be the fixed scope project. If your project is relatively smaller and you know exactly what you want, you can decide upfront what you want done, in how much time, and at what cost. This usually doesn’t work on dynamic projects where changes need to be made quickly, but if you know exactly what you want, you could choose the fixed-scope model.
Conclusion
Hiring a dedicated team for app development is the smart choice for savvy entrepreneurs, startups, and SMBs. With access to a vast talent pool, competitive pricing, and optimum control over the development trajectory, it makes for the perfect app development engagement model. As long as you can choose a good app development company, you are set free of worries of hiring individuals such as developers, designers, and tech managers. Just focus on your core business and let the dedicated app development team work as an extension of your in-house team, closely following your instructions to build your app just as your envisioned it.
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