Outsourced Product Development: Your Guide to A Successful Project

Outsourced Product Development - Your Guide to A Successful Project
04
Nov

Over the past 15 years, we have seen an increasing number of customer companies looking to outsource their product development to us. We attribute this growth to the fact that among the benefits of product outsourcing is to allow the company to free up resources to focus on product marketing, a core competency needed to succeed in today’s competitive market.

Unfortunately, successful software outsourcing doesn’t always happen. When it comes to outsourced product development, companies usually have to bear several outsourcing risks such as poor development team performance and low product quality, as well as communication issues, and security related problems.

To avoid product outsourcing risks and make outsourcing development truly beneficial for your project, we will give a detailed answer below to the question that many companies ask themselves: “How do we find an outsourcing vendor that will not let us down?”

Not sure which vendor to outsource your product development project to? In this article, we explain how to minimize the risks of software product development outsourcing and what factors to check in an outsourcing vendor’s proposal to ensure their proficiency. And when short-listing the potential software development partner for your project, be sure to consider Trustify Technology’s software product development services.

Outsourced Software Product Development

If you ask clients of a small-medium development company about the advantages of such a vendor, they will mention flexibility, ease of collaboration, and better cost-effectiveness compared to larger players. We support this point of view when we discuss the development of various features of a product or a set of functions. However, the more complex and technologically demanding you plan to outsource development, the more likely it is that you will achieve the opposite effect.

As mentioned above, to ensure outsourcing success, there certain factors that you need to consider when short-listing vendors:

  • Fast delivery. Leading outsourcing services providers bring established processes and automated delivery pipelines and have many experts with mainstream technical skills (e.g. AI, Big Data, etc.) and specific industry knowledge that your projects require. For example, Trustify’s technology can help deliver the first MVP in a matter of months, resulting in shorter time to market with lower costs and faster ROI.
  • Strong technical expertise. A qualified software development outsourcing provider does not depend on just a few certain sets of technologies and actually chooses the technology stack according to your needs. When a vendor limits the selection of the technologies, there is a risk of restricting the product’s capabilities.
  • Continuous and comprehensive backup. A qualified vendor can support the ongoing and continuous development of your product and add value by providing other required services (e.g. UI/UX, business analysis, maintenance and support services, etc.) which you may need later. Some vendors can only build the product to a certain level of development (e.g. due to the limit of capabilities and technical abilities) and then customers have to look for another vendor or wait for more resources to become available.

Choose a vendor with an established development process 

One of the most reliable criteria revealing the effectiveness of a software development vendor is the structure of the development process which the vendor uses. 

An established and mature process greatly increases the likelihood that the final product will match with the desired results. In software development, standards include coding, testing and integration, version control, and change management, etc. At your request, your software vendor should be able to provide the relevant Standard Operating Procedure  (SOP) documentation or part thereof to help you understand how your development process is progressing. 

Additionally, one of the main problems with outsourcing product development is the limited ability to monitor the process from the outside. Therefore, we recommend that you look for a vendor that prioritizes the principle of transparent cooperation. This includes daily communication, weekly reporting and constant access to tasks tracking software such as Jira. You can ask the vendor for an example of a partnership or IT outsourcing models to help you understand their approach.

We understand that you expect the outsourcing team to share your product vision, but at the same time, you are also concerned about the potential issues of poor communication and feedback due to them working in a remote or offshore location. To avoid this, we recommend:

  • Ask to have a Business Analyst (BA) in your outsourcing team. The BA is a bridge between the technical personnel and the business, ultimately helping presenting your product vision to the outsourced team members.
  • Choose a vendor with extensive experience in your field. To ensure a thorough understanding of your product, BAs and developers need to understand the specifics of your industry. So choose a vendor that has ample testimonials and case studies to demonstrate their previous work on similar projects.

Security & Data Protection: How To Set It Right

You may be wondering, “What’s at stake for my company’s data and intellectual property when outsourcing?” Fortunately, there are many ways to ensure security at different levels:

  • Protecting company data. With a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), you can help safeguard your product ideas, technical data, pricing strategies, marketing strategies, and other confidential company information from being shared with other third parties. You can also ask potential vendors to sign an NDA before you share your product vision, even if you haven’t decided whether to work with them yet.
  • Intellectual property rights. By agreement, you must have full ownership of the projects (including source code, product descriptions, etc.) with any changes made by the vendor reflected. With these artifacts, you can modify your product after the project is over, even if you’ve split from the original outsourcing team. And if you have to change vendors during the project, you won’t lose your progress.
  • Product and consumer protection. To ensure the security of users’ data, vendors should have a reliable system with all necessary security measures (e.g. IDS/IPS, DLP) and comply with industry standard requirements (e.g. HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR) in their development process.

Final-notes

Even if all recommendations are followed, you may still want to evaluate the vendor’s competencies before venturing into a full-scale product development project. In this case, you can:

  • Start with a proof-of-concept or limit the project to MVP development (and extend the contract once you are satisfied with the results).
  • If a project is already under development, you can outsource a part of the project for a test-drive before fully outsourcing it.

If done properly, product outsourcing can be an effective strategy to gain a competitive advantage. Whether you are building a brand new product or breathing new life into an existing “problematic” development, don’t hesitate to ask for our help.