Product Development Outsourcing: How to Implement My Business Idea With External Experts

Many business owners prefer to outsource product development. However, each team can come to a parting of the ways and choose the most appropriate cooperation model:

• Allow IT company to develop a product from scratch.
• Buy a ready-to-use solution with the features your business requires.
• Hire external specialists to create a business product.

Of course, the easiest way is to choose the second option. Since you immediately get the ready-made product and start your work. However, in most cases, such products have universal functionality.

In other words, there is a low probability that such a product will meet your business requirements. Moreover, as your business expands, the product needs further customizations. It entails additional expenses and time spent creating new functions.

Why do most customers and organizations choose to outsource their product development?

Outsourcing is an excellent business model of collaboration that helps the company focus on critical processes instead of rolling into cumbersome development tasks. When creating a product on your own, you must continuously monitor the process and ensure that each task is completed on time. Working with an outsourcing model, you get a team including a project manager, developers, QA engineers, business analysts, etc.. In this case, PM is responsible for the process setup. So, you do not need to control each stage.

If you decide to develop the project on your own, then you’d better be prepared for possible failure or issues at some stages. If you don’t have the knowledge and expertise to build business products, you can waste effort and money receiving a product that doesn’t match your preferences or business strategy. The best way is to delegate project development to external developers who create the product following all standards.

The outsourcing team helps you avoid unnecessary expenses. When you work on product development, such a running cycle may require significant investments. Outsourcing allows you to entail an accurate project estimation, so you pay only for the development process (any other costs linked with technology or training are excluded).

When your project is implemented, further support, internal resource management, or technical assistance become challenging tasks for the product owner. Often, customers must look for new workers to fix issues or improve the product on their own, that leads to further expenses. Nevertheless, you can easily avoid this by cooperating with an external IT team.

The outsourcing model allows you to pick up specialists whose expertise meets high standards. Thus, you may not worry about the final result, since each employee has profound knowledge in his/her field and many years of prior experience working on different projects.

At the start, while you have no investment and in-house team, it is much more profitable to hire the external staff. It allows to speed up the processes implementation and stimulate the company’s activity at the early stages. Besides, you can delegate the development of some individual modules or project parts to see how the team deals with the tasks. You can also choose the desired payment model (for example, a fixed price where the organisation carries out specific tasks within set timeframes).

Stages of outsourced product development

Idea generation

You can share your ideas with external specialists. Some teams can help you conduct a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis that identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the product or analyze the market and competitors to find out what product your target audience prefers. Feedback from your team can be a valuable push for new product ideas.

Concept creation

Once the team has performed the analysis, you proceed to the prototyping phase. This process allows you to get a product concept and test it with your customers to see whether the product solves business issues. The draft version enables you to check the functionality and define whether the team has created the appropriate product or it needs additional improvements and modifications.

Development and testing

Now you need to turn the prototype into a finished product. At this stage, the team creates a minimally viable product (MVP). The developers choose the necessary technologies and produce the functionality of the project, compose modules or work on other technical characteristics. After the product is ready, QA-engineers check it and fix the bugs.

Ready to build a great business product? Let’s discuss it with our Wetelo team! Contact us, and we will provide you with a free recommendation about how to create a tool according to your company strategy.