When you have an idea which you want to build into a product, historically, you had only two options, hiring an in-house team or getting it done through an agency. Both of these have their own pros and cons. But, as an entrepreneur, you would want to get best of both worlds. And Yes! You have a third choice – TaaS – Team as a Service. With Team as a Service or TaaS for short, you hire a team to work on your business idea/product. This team is consistently dedicated to delivering a high-quality product, which is managed by their own product manager/CTO who handles project management, hiring, payroll, quality control and on-time delivery. Similar to outsourcing, your organization is free from hiring woes and other cost overheads. At the same time, similar to the in-house team, you have complete control over the team. You can also interview the team members and have personal interaction individually.
Here we discuss the above three approaches to product development.
Costs involved:
When you hire an in-house team of developers, designers, testers, products managers and appoint a CTO to spearhead these teams, the costs involved are very high. Moreover, it’s a fixed recurring expense that you have to bear.
Contrary to this, outsourcing your project is a cost effective alternative. But the flipside here is that any addition of features or changes will add up to your bills.
The real dilemma here is that entrepreneurs would want to cut down the overall cost of the project and would still want a certain degree of flexibility. This is where TaaS outperforms both outsourcing and in-house teams. TaaS works on a model of monthly budget/retainer, which helps you avoid any surprise bills at the end of the month.
Culture:
When you have an in-house technology team, you get to define the culture of the team and company at large. You get to decide the working hours, the work environment, etc. The entire ship is in your control and you are the captain.
When you outsource your product to an agency, you hardly have any say in deciding on the team that works on your product.
TaaS is more of a hybrid between the two where you can be a decision maker on who should be working on your product idea and can define the best practices to have cultural uniformity.
Flexibility and scalability:
Outsourcing is highly flexible where the number of people working on the product is none of your concerns till the project follows the timelines. Delivering the project on time is agency’s work.
While in the case where you have built your own team, moving slow or fast on the product development might need hiring or laying off people in the team. Which can be a time-consuming and tiring process.
TaaS, on the other hand, gives you all the flexibility of outsourcing where you can add more people working on your product so as to speed up the development process as you scale.
Hiring and skill-set identification:
Hiring is going to be the biggest challenge when you are just starting up. Identifying the A players with right kind of ambition is itself a herculean task. Hiring for tech. positions become even more difficult when you do not have a CTO.
This gets super easy when you are outsourcing the development work to an agency. All the burden of hiring for matching skill-sets gets offloaded to the agency you are working with. This comes at the cost of limited control over people getting onboard.
TaaS relieves you from the hassle of finding people who fit into the role at hand while giving you all the control and freedom of interviewing developers and managers going to work on your product.
Quality Assurance:
As an entrepreneur, having a good quality product is one of your topmost priorities.
When you have your own technology team, you have complete control over the quality of the product being built, quality of code being written etc. But, this comes with its own costs of setting us a quality assurance and testing team.
This cost gets reduced when you outsource the software development, as the QA team can be shared with other clients by the agency. But, at times this does result in a low-quality product.
When you are working with a partner on the model of Team as a Service, you can call the shots and pull in a QA person as and when required to ensure the product quality.
Types of Projects:
When deciding to work on your software project, choosing the development model depends a lot on the type of project at hand. For well-funded companies having long-term projects, building an in-house team will be a more sensible move in the long run.
While for a one-off project or short term projects and when the idea you are working on is quite matured, outsourcing is the best way to go as hiring people full time will be a costly and time-taking process. However, changes and feature addition will need getting into a new contract and cost negotiations with your outsourcing agency.
Team as a Service works right for both long-term and short-term product projects. It is more suited for long-term projects where you do not want to get into having an in-house team but need to get a good quality product on time into the market.
Management, payrolls and other Overheads:
When you have an in-house team, there’s a lot of overheads like payrolls, employee welfare, office spaces, infrastructure etc. that you would need to take care of. Moreover, your technology team might have completely different needs in terms of management and company culture than other departments of your organisation.
While in the outsourcing model all these overheads are taken care of by the agency, which gives you time and resources to focus on growing the business.
TaaS, in this case, is same as outsourcing and helps the entrepreneur in having a fixed monthly budget for product development.
In nutshell, in-house teams provide more control and a better skill set identification while outsourcing reduces cost and helps organizations focus on their core competencies. So what should one select- in-house teams or outsourcing agency? In most practical scenarios, companies would want to cut down on cost and also have all the control. This is where TaaS comes in. It is a unique arrangement where cost effectiveness does not imply that you would have to relent certain degree of control or quality standards. Organizations around the globe have been adopting TaaS rapidly and it’s time for you to join the bandwagon.
In this regard, Sugoi Labs has been constantly striving to keep the superlatives justified in the way work is done ever since its inception. With this innovative idea of developing a product, it’s time you choose to stay stubborn for the best results by joining hands with nothing but the best.