Business Challenges: How to Set up a Top-Notch Software Development Team

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Biggest Challenges of Setting up a Software Development Team

• Challenge 1: Fast-scaling startup
• Challenge 2: Instant team extension
• Challenge 3: Understaffed on-board team
• Challenge 4: Technology incompetence

  3.     Our Solutions - Your Benefits

Over the years, we’ve been pondering on our blog upon technology and business but not very much upon our ways of doing things. It's high time to change that, isn’t it?

What we do in our talent marketplace is, simply put, all types of tailor-made IT outsourcing services under one roof: body leasing, staff leasing, and team extension. What we strive for is an excellency in all of them.

In this piece, we’d like to take you through the most significant challenges our clients face and why they chose us to resolve them. We’ll discuss the process of how to set up a software development team, what solutions we propose, and why.

We’ll move from IT challenges to case studies showcasing how we resolved those issues.

Let's dive in!

Biggest Challenges of Setting up a Software Development TeamChallenge 1

Your challenge: You're scaling a startup fast, lacking an HR team on board. 

Our solution: If you cannot set up a software development team as you scale quickly, we can find a perfect match of qualified talents with the right skill set for your project. This way, you can focus on your core business and leave us the hiring struggle. Moreover, we charge only for the actual tech talent working hours while the whole hiring process is on us.

To learn more about how we match battle-proven tech talents with companies worldwide, read our fresh publication on how our Talent Team cherry-picks freelance software developers.

Our success story:

A burgeoning startup that creates custom packaging for B2B companies worldwide, needed to develop a new, sustainable module for their inefficient system based on Ruby on Rails, but they were struggling because of lack of an in-house HR team. 

We stepped in and recruited half the talents needed for the new project. We delivered the best-fit software engineering team of six developers and an IT project manager who would meet their specific requirements. The talent from our vast network not only implemented the new module but also performed a series of technical meetings to build bridges between the module and the system.

Along with the sharp increase in contractors, we allowed them to meet the tight deadline set by the investors, skyrocket their system for order optimization, scale up even faster and experience explosive growth. A few successful hires later, we became their trusted, long-term talent delivery partner. Now, we support them ad hoc whenever they need front-end enigneers or Ruby on Rails developers. 

But that’s not all about it! Now the client benefits from our tailor-made body leasing services, such as:

• try-and-buy option (the guys hire only the talent that met their expectations during the trial period) 
• and swift (under 24 hours!), guaranteed exchange of programmers.

Awesome, isn’t it?

Challenge 2

Your challenge: You need a developer just for a moment throughout your project.

Our solution: We support ventures at every growth stage and know too well that the demand for employees with a particular tech stack can be fleeting. Whenever you need to set up a software development team for a brief time, we can extremely fast build a team made of specialists in virtually any technology. Then it all will depend on your business needs, but most of our clients continue to scale with us after they notice how well matched is the talent provided by us.

Our success story:

Our client can boast of being one of Europe's largest and most influential Japanese retailers. They’ve been offering authentic Japanese products for over four decades, running three stores and two restaurants in the heart of London.

For their e-commerce platform and B2B wholesale website, with the back-end built on Ruby on Rails, Ruby, and MySQL, they needed to find an expert front-end developer to fix all the bugs quickly and seamlessly.

The client's development team included a Product Owner, their current development team, and the new team built by us. The development process went smoothly: first, to thoroughly assess the project's complexity, our team familiarized themselves with the existing codebase. The handover complexity depended on the current technical state of the application (codebase, toolset, CI/CD, hosting, etc.). And we must admit, the project architecture was significantly extended in this case, including seven different systems: retail stores, wholesale stores, stock control system, restaurant websites, and more. Therefore, the codebase was huge, too (nine repositories spanning multiple RoR apps).

We delivered a lead engineer - senior Ruby on Rails programmer, who found a good balance between growing the business and improving the quality of the code. He took care of the workshop and handover processes and built the rest of the team which structure's depended on the client’s plans and needs. 

After studying all the documentation thoroughly and conducting the workshop to plan future tasks, our team set up local development environments and took over the work.

Also, we provided them with a project manager who worked hard to reduce the technology debt. He created a roadmap, determined quick wins, and after a few months, the debt went down.

With time passing, we set up for them a large software development team tailored for their needs. Despite the architecture's complexity, the positive outcome of the initial work resulted in long-term, fruitful cooperation.

Challenge 3

Your challenge: Your software development team feels overwhelmed because you're understaffed.

Our solution: Scaling an in-house team with external developers for a faster development process. We have plenty of examples of setting up a software development team when you’re understaffed, so let’s examine two of them.

Our success stories:

Client 1.

We found fourteen programmers for our sizeable corporate FinTech client, one of the top 10 banks in Poland, developing an app that serves over two million users. The client came to us with a long-term, well-organized project of evolving nature. The problem consisted of low turnover caused by a too heavy workload and staff shortages. As a remedy, the client decided to engage new tech talents for a long while.

We jumped in right away and recruited eight mobile developers in just two months! Soon the client became so satisfied with our speed and approach that other departments started to ask for more mobile developers and other IT specialists, such as business analysts, senior .NET programmers, or React engineers.

Client 2.

Meanwhile, with another considerable client, one of the world's largest mobile network operators, we have matched sixteen contractors to craft the optimal mobile experience.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, everything changed in the telecommunications market. When the remote-first approach entered, corporations had to deal with an enormous number of employees’ rotations, whereas Polish companies suddenly started competing with large US enterprises. How to set up a software development team in these challenging conditions?

Our client began to lose employees, and we have proven helpful by delivering them four React Native developers, five Java developers, and many more IT experts over time, all during the significant retention. Our software engineers proved to be independent and self-organized contributors who work in autonomous teams.

Thanks to that, the client enjoyed a continuity of day-to-day operations despite the intricacies arising during the pandemic's difficult time.

Challenge 4

Your challenge: You struggle with the lack of competence of the current team in your chosen technologies.

Our solution: Providing specialists with the right tech stack at the right time.

Our success stories: 

Client 1.

The client who approached us with this issue specializes in the text recruiting software meant to speed up the HR processes. We helped them leverage the HubSpot ecosystem's full power by constructing a robust marketing environment.

The client came to us as a startup in the process of funding by outside investors with two major issues: a desire to move their site from WordPress to the HubSpot CMS (our claim to fame) and a need for rebranding.

They wanted to collect user data more efficiently, and HubSpot CMS turned out to be a perfect choice for doing that as it measures traffic intuitively and in great detail, for instance, how many people decide to schedule a call with a consultant.

We knew how to set up a software development team tailor-made for their needs. Our experts took over the project and kicked it off with a workshop. We gathered requirements and mockups, and our graphic designer created visuals in Figma for web and mobile. Our senior and mid HubSpot engineers rewrote the website on HubSpot, and our project manager planned the work for the team, reported to the client, designed sprints, and managed weekly calls with the client. 

The result? An outstanding platform with a new, magnificent UX design. The client's team appreciated our financially attractive offer compared to the competition. Now they enjoy all custom-made features and significantly boosted page performance.

Do you also consider migrating your website to the HubSpot CMS? Or building a HubSpot website from scratch? Whatever the case, you’re in good hands: it’s our beacon, we’re the official HubSpot Partner!

Our HubSpot experts will take your website to the next level by performing the technical and UX/UI audit, proposing improvements, and developing dedicated features.

Check out how to use HubSpot CMS to build your website and how we harvested the full power of HubSpot to build our own tech talent marketplace platform on it.

Client 2.

Another client struggling with a similar issue was a delivery-only restaurant franchise chain for which we developed a scalable mobile app from scratch.

Instead of relying on third-party food delivery platforms, such as Uber Eats, Deliveroo, or Glovo, they wanted to shift into a custom solution tailored to the needs of over 10k of their British, French, and Spanish customers with more than 1k orders per hour.

They had their dev team lacking, however, React Native developers (mobile) and NodeJS developers (back-end) on board. That’s where we stepped in by setting up a team of 2 front-end engineers, a back-end engineer, and a project manager who organized work in Agile Scrum methodology.

Starting with the highest priority functionalities, we developed the powerful app step by step in one-week sprints, including features like:

• three app languages, 
• geolocation for automatic kitchen selection out of over 40 locations,
• click-and-collect feature (to save on delivery costs), 
• discounts/coupon codes, 
• payment data management (cards, restaurant vouchers, account balance, money pot).

Our engineers have done a comprehensive, end-to-end job in a fast and robust way and successfully delivered the custom-built Android and iOS apps, as well as a web-based back office.

Our Solutions - Your Benefits

As you can see, at Ideamotive, we have a solution for every issue that may come your way. Worry not, and check out what else we accomplished for our clients. Whatever challenge you come with, we got you covered!

Some other projects we mastered include:

• perfect team extension match for KNOWD
• body leasing for VUniverse
• business support for PerkTeam and Renderro
• building an MVP for Fasadio
• scaling the development team and adding new technologies for CarPal
• facilitating international collaboration for Road.Travel

… and many more! Check out all our success stories and our article on top IT outsourcing challenges for more insights on the topic.

And if you consider moving your software development abroad, you may be interested in the more in-depth analysis of the state of software development outsourcing and offshoring in the Central & East Europe.

Despite having your HR department, you may still find it challenging to select the best fit for your projects, considering the limited talent pool in software development. For instance, you might have recruiters skilled in hiring front-end engineers but experiencing trouble testing and vetting the back-end ones. If you still ask yourself how to set up a software development team, count on our Matchmaking Team. It comprises technical specialists, coders, and scrum masters who understand what exactly is needed for each position and how to measure it.

As the Covid-19 crisis has permanently transformed IT recruitment and talent shortages persist, it’s high time to stop eschewing software outsourcing. To learn more about your opportunities, read our Forbes articles on reasons to consider software outsourcing and Poland as the go-to IT outsourcing hub.

We'd like to wrap it up with the well-known quote:

"master your strengths, outsource your weaknesses."

and add to it: and enjoy the benefits of an agile workforce no longer bound by physical borders.

At Ideamotive, we are tech agnostic, delivering digital solutions in every technology. We create estimations, challenge all the candidates technically and provide robust and scalable products in no time. And we let you focus on developing other areas of your business simultaneously.

So, how to set up a top-notch software development team? You’re in the right place to get it done.