Agile and Scrum | Outsourcing & offshoring
What Works in Offshore Agile Development 
Sashikanth Pochimcharla 10 Oct, 2014
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An MVP is not a full-fledged product. It doesn’t contain all the ideas of the makers and the complete functionality. It is a basic but working product intended to test hypotheses and receive feedback from early users. Some innovators build the MVP themselves and some choose to offshore its development. Whatever its origins may be, it is not easy to turn it into a complete sophisticated product. While many innovators understand the domain, shaping it into a product the innovators intend to requires deep technical knowledge and a committed and growing engineering team.
Building a good development team is not an easy task. It may be difficult for the makers to find the right talent. Or they may find it too taxing to recruit professionals, manage them, and run a development centre. Collaborating with a reliable and experienced product engineering partner can help them in mainly two ways. They can better concentrate on other aspects of their business that requires their attention. And offshoring can help them save money.
Here’s how a product development partner can help you turn your MVP into a successful product and a profitable business.
Co-creation
Building resilient businesses with customer-friendly products requires co-creation. When distributed teams co-create, they provide multiple perspectives and help you in defining the most appropriate product roadmap that determines features to be included in subsequent releases.
Objective Analysis
An MVP is used to receive feedback and test several hypotheses. Depending on the feedback, modifications are made to the product plan. A good development team provides an objective analysis of early user feedback. The feedback can be used to mold the product to have a clear value proposition that is promising and can attract customers.
Providing Flexible Development Capacity
It is not required to recruit everyone on the team early. The team should grow with the product. Finding and recruiting talent when required is crucial to implementing the product plan. An offshoring partner quickly recruits and onboards skilled software developers from a pre-screened pool. The team can grow as per the evolving needs. The partner also takes care of the infrastructure requirements of the growing team.
Recruiting a Dedicated Team
As the product grows, the team grows beyond a couple of developers into a full-fledged team. The team may be required to work with the onsite team or independently. Your offshoring partner can set up a customized team tailored to your needs (selected and recruited by you) that will work for you exclusively.
Establishing an Offshore Development Centre
As a software business, if you are looking to diversify your development footprint and support service delivery across multiple geographies, then you will need a distributed organizational setup with people, processes, infrastructure, and governance. An ODC consists of multiple teams, with fully integrated processes and workflow to support co-Creation at scale. It is staffed by people with a broad range of skills, expertise, and capabilities to handle the complete range of innovation needs and support all your product and service lines. A good partner can establish an ODC for you that can provide flexibility to handle demand spikes. You can significantly lower and optimize the cost of services through a judicious mix of onshore and offshore resources.
Though it is important to think short-term and develop products and platforms in sprint cycles, having a plan that is also long-term and yet flexible can assure successful business outcomes. Adjusting product plans to the context and conditions is as important as the initial idea, the product, or the platform itself, especially during uncertain times. Building MVP is a journey, not a destination.
Hence it is advisable to choose a development partner that can provide you with the required product design and engineering expertise, and more importantly a stable team. Ensuring low attrition is important to retain knowledge of the product and improvise it. coMakeIT has been helping numerous product innovators grow from a small team to an offshore development centre and further into a fully owned, offshore, captive organization. Are you looking for a strategic collaboration to support your product or business growth?
The author was a java Developer at coMakeIT before turning into a stay-at-home-mom. She slowed down to make art, tell stories, read books on fiction, philosophy, science, art-history, write about science, parenting, and observe technology trends. She loves to write and aspires to write simple and understandable articles someday like Yuval Noah Harari. We are very happy to have her back at coMakeIT and contribute to our relevant and thought provoking content.
