Are remote development teams the future of startups?

 

The darkest clouds of COVID-19 delivered a historic silver lining for startups.

 

With sudden transitions from on-site working modules to fully remote procedures, startups gained revolutionary momentum in history.

 

Amidst the post-pandemic sensation, IT is the second largest industry to integrate the remote work module with success.

 

When developers started embracing the work-life balance shift, the cream talent centrifuged towards ease. This shift transformed the “Then Startups” to “Now Successful Enterprises".

 

The ease, speed, and success ratio already suggest the future is all about remote development teams.

 

In this blog post, we’ll walk you through all the why(s) and how(s) of remote development teams. Carrying forward to this post, you won’t wonder “why is remote development the future of startups”.

 

Why remote development teams are in trend?

 

 

Simply put, startups hire outsourced or remote developers to:

• Save more, spend less, and earn double
• Ship products faster into the market, i.e., Ship products faster into the market. Acquire competitive talent from around the globe
• Retain best development talent with agile innovation
• Staying ahead of competitors 
  
  

All of this requires a strong mapping from the beginning of the product development till the end. 

 

But how?

Uncovering details here:

 

Cost reduction 

The moment you plan to hire a developer, there’s a cost associated with it. The breakdown of these costs goes something like this:

 

• Recruitment cost: The internal HR staff, application tracking systems, and advertising contribute to the sum of recruitment costs. Managed team model can save you by dominating your recruiting department and saving all other hidden fees.
• Equipment and utility costs: If you are hiring developers through a software development company or a technology partner they take responsibility for providing state-of-the-art equipment to the developers. 
• Employee perks and benefits: Admit it, all startups promise a raise in salary after probation that may occur before your venture scales up. With no strings attached, all the employment perks and bonuses are your development partner’s headache. You only pay for your software development lifecycle on a fixed budget.
• Training and administrative costs: Personal development training is just another extension of recruitment costs. Outsourcing companies train their developers to win the competition. Hence, your right remote development partner waves your training and administrative charges. 

Scalability

With remote development teams, avoiding resource draw down or restaffing becomes a piece of cake. 

 

The infancy stage of every startup demands a greater pool of developer talent. But what about days when the resources are free? 

 

Firing them will not only put your reputation at stake but also put you in cold waters when you need extra helping hands. 

 

The best alternative to this could be none other than ramping your development on pillars and start living ahead of your competitors in advance. 

Diversity and Inclusion

Imagine bringing smarter brains from different parts of the world with each breeding a new perspective in your unit.

 

 

For you, this might be your first product development adventure but for them, it could be their 6th or 7th one. Since you’ll be choosing a credible partner for structuring teams, it will be their 300th product.

 

Pre-vetted, trained remote developers know the drill of making your product happen at its finest. 

Managing Remote development teams

 

 

• Documentation
• Timeline and deliverability

 

It’s all about keeping every document, developer, and project manager within a nexus. When all members stay connected the chances of failures drop to a minimum. We’ve spoken to several successful enterprises and, grownup startups about their success mapping and timelines. Major needle movers for all these successful ventures rotate in the same dimension. 

 

Some overlapping takeaways behind their success begin with the:

Best project management practice

 

 

Either on-site or remote, no teams can perform above par without connective experience. But the curve here is, in remote setups, you’re not meeting up with your colleagues during coffee breaks or lunchtime. There’s ample space for assumptions and miscommunication dropping coordination bombs. 

 

That’s exactly where project management practices become handy for the entire hierarchy. 

 

Clearly, there’s no one-fit-for-all rule for remote development teams. All successful startups align remote experts in their teams to pull everyone on the same page and push deliverables at door step

Studies have shown these top-tier remote software development teams went smarter, not harder. 

 

The journey rolls down to:

• Project Mapping

For startups, there’s a plate full of attention to be addressed. Planning advancement strategies, risk assessment, and project scope become the pillars of development strategy. The project map becomes a guide for developers sitting oceans across the company and guides at each stage of the development process.

• Experienced Project Manager

Person butting in the driving seat shapes the destiny of your project. Choosing a skilled project manager has the power of fastening the scattered and most complicated jigsaws of your project. Monitoring frameworks, acquisition strategies, clear check-ins, task tracking, and all project management tools come under his/her umbrella.

• Monitoring & Control

Gone are the trends for micromanaging. Sequential monitoring keeps track of every move even when your team is sitting in different time zones away from you. 

• Resource allocation

Getting the best talent aligned according to project priorities and requirements builds up accuracy in project timelines and final outcomes. Hand-picking from a global pool of talent with the best retention rates never leaves you stranded in the middle of your development cycle. 

• Absolute Communication and collaboration

Communication is the gateway to risk assessment and handling, making it seamless for all. Nurturing a collaborative environment encourages everyone to participate and resolve hurdles before they get unmanageable. 

• Regular check-ins

Despite the magnitude of the inconvenience, it should be resolved at its earliest. Check-ins via mediums like Slack, Skype, Toggle, or any private organizational platform puts your developers in front of you and pours the magic of being done in seconds. 

The Turnaround of remote software development teams

That’s the wrap for all efforts. 

 

When employees stopped showing up in offices during the pandemic, active brains started thinking differently. Ventures that broke the stereotypic barriers of seat-butted employees are already living the future of their competitors. 

Living proof of this concept includes companies like:

• Automattic

Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, explicitly talks about the golden sword outcomes of inclusivity in remote collaboration. Automattic, the brains behind WordPress, WooCommerce, and Tumbler closed their headquarters in San Fransisco and shifted the work module to remote under the title of “Distributed Working”. The company has a total of more than 860 employees in over 68 countries and preaches remote collaboration as one of its most functional pillars. 

• Appen

Appen has been Flexjob’s featured employer for being the top collaborator for remote jobs. In 2016, Mark Brayan, the CEO of Appen spoke about its business model and said:
“It requires thousands of freelancers”.
Their number of outsourced employees has reached over 1 million and is increasing each day. 

• Dell

Dell being a global telecommuting solution provider sets an exemplary remote work environment for its users. From virtual interviews to employee branding or entertaining sessions on social media, everything is being managed remotely by its very own employee resource group Conexus. Apart from shifting its work modules to flexibility, Dell also became the energy wealthiest conserver of electricity and CO2 in 2015 due to its telecommuting adoption. 

• Toggle 

Remote work wouldn’t have been possible without time management and tracking software like Toggle. This multi-verse of time tracking is a team of 76 active brains spread across 19 timezones helping teams stay on the same page. The most interesting part about Toggle is its icebreaker move for ditching the venture capital interests and moving to a full-time outsourcing module. 

• Gitlab

Gitlab opened its eyes in the realms of remote development modules when both its CEOs dreamed of the same project in two opposite parts of the world. With all its remote manifestations, the company has raised its turnaround from $100 Million to over a Billion dollars in the shortest span.

Engagement models: Build teams on your terms

All reactants require a catalyst for their conversion.

 

 

No products, apps, or websites would have come into existence without a solid engagement model that acts as an enzyme with developers as reactants. 

 

These engagement models distribute the task and scope of the project among developers sitting in different geographical zones. 

 

Moreover, engagement models don’t require dramatic changes in your existing teams.

 

Several engagement models have acquired existence to fit in different organizational structures, yet the most successful ones include:

Team Augmentation

As the name suggests, this model becomes handy when extra hands are required in an existing team. Let’s suppose you already have an excellent team, but looking for an experienced manager to steer your deliverables in a better direction, this model is going to be your ideal fit. 

 

Similarly, If you already have an excellent team of developers and looking to expand it for a smarter turnaround, choose hand-picked developers with the right development partners.

Remote dedicated software development teams

You want a standalone team to work on a feature or a module from planning to ideation to developing, deploying, and delivering. You get a dedicated team.

 

To cater this in the most efficient manner, dedicated teams of developers (front-end, back-end, Full Sack), QA, DevOps including, a project manager, and all necessary supplies are allocated in this model. This team works solely on your project with single-minded motivation.

Managed IT Teams

Building a website app, or service from scratch? You definitely can’t rely on underqualified resources, but your budget can’t support recruitment and other hidden charges. 

 

Managed Teams model can fit best into your missing puzzle. Your development team providers will take responsibility for hiring, firing, and retaining the engineers from the beginning till the end. This is by far the most successful model helping startups sit at the top of the Fortune 500’s list. 

FAQs

What’s the difference between remote and distributed teams?

 

More or less both remote and distributed teams are conjugates of each other. Remote and distributed development teams are interchangeably used for developers working indifferent timezones. Strategically, these remote or distributed developers are aligned on projects to overlap the duration and time differences. 

 

To what extent is the remote development team the future of AI?

 

Remote development teams get stronger with AI assistance. AI has revolutionized the management strings in remote development teams. From recruitment to allocating the best suitable roles, every subject becomes automated and organized with artificial intelligence.

 

What type of engagement models are involved in remote workforce?

 

Remote work is being managed in 3 different modules.

Various models exist, and organizations often choose the one that aligns best with their goals, project requirements, and team dynamics. Namely, these 3 models are:

 

• Staff augmentation
• Fixed Gigs
• Outsourcing 

The Bottomline

Building a remote development team with trusted partners has revolutionized the history of startups. The successful blocks of remote development are giving birth to the future of startups with less dependency and more accuracy.