Product development Outsourcing is a critical decision for any organization when made. The common goal for outsourcing the development is Quality product and Cost saving. This involves many factors :
1. Cost Saving on Hiring : Need not interview a lot of them, and then build a productive team as a whole.
2. Wide Range of Technologies: You get access to there employees, options of choosing the right tool and also to experience knowledge as equivalent to that of developers.
3. Scalability: Along with the product roadmap team size would be scalable with the skills required, and when outsourcing is done the risk is transferred to the contractor to maintain the engineering team and product owner concentrate on the core business idea, sales channels, and users- which is very important for the business.
What to expect when you outsource product development and how to make efficient interaction process.
1. Set Minimum Viable Product: No wonder that market is changing rapidly and if Go to Market is taking a year, then it will be an out-dated one. So, at the start release a minimalistic solution, that solves the basic needs and then add functionality to it.
2. Interact with the team: In rapid software development, creates an additional burden on you as a customer. In Agile methodology, Product owner- a role is required to define the functionality of the product and prioritizing the features. The role here is not a person, responsibility of the role should be divided.
3. Quality comes with a price, nothing is free: Many freelance developers can develop a clone of any product, but behind that many inefficient management and defects are going to exist. In the long run, the product owner ends up with scalability issue. Choosing the right set of the team with little extra cost goes profitable in the long run.
4. Share the vision and know-how: Share your whole business idea, an outsourcing company will not steal the idea from you but understands the key concepts of business, your problems, strategies, budget, timing, and features. Understanding the business is a very important factor for the outsourcing development team to build a quality Product for you.
What is required/ not required before you start outsourcing software development
Required:
1. Sound understanding of product concept: Identity purpose, users and monetization methods. Tools that can help: Impact Mapping, Canva Business Modeling, Customer Interviews, A/B testing with Landing Pages.
2. Create some designs and mockups: Basic mockup or sketches and the customer road map is important. The neat design should be maintained as in this stage to understand how your users will “navigate” the product and features they will use.
3. Fix the budget and schedule: Share this with your contractor, and determine the amount of time to communicate with the team. Phase wise demo for progress to monitor the development of the product.
Not Required:
The hiring of the technical writer or business analyst.
What to be known when a team is selected
Kick-off phase with a technical expert, sales manager, and project manager
1. Discuss the main artifacts of the project, make a plan on what is missing, vision about the project’s purpose, users and threads.
2. Interaction with designers from the beginning is very important as design is the critical part of the application. Once the design prototype is signed off then the actual product development should kick off.
3. Discuss the division of the Product Owner responsibility.
4. Keep updates with product development and delivery. Phase wise demo is important to meet the timeline for Go to Market plan.
Clear Project Road map
The product roadmap is very important from day one. Phase wise product feature planning and the design part comes at the first phase.
At this phase, changes are affordable in terms of cost and time. Once development starts the price of correcting the product flow change will increase at each stage. We are almost involved in the process to avoid such situations, but without your expert knowledge, we are unlikely to build an innovative product.