Outsourced Software Product Development: Benefits, Process, and Success Stories

Modern IT industry offers businesses two main approaches to satisfying complex software needs: outsourced software product development and maintaining an in-house team of engineers.

Despite the overall similarity of these approaches, many pitfalls and unobvious differences exist, which can significantly impact the final result. Therefore, let’s cross the t’s and dot the i’s by considering outsourced product development, its benefits, and some case studies.

A deeper examination of outsourced products can help learn how this model differs from traditional development approaches and determine what outsourcing can offer to all types of businesses.

Outsourced Software Product Development Explained

First of all, let’s clarify the core differences between outsourced and in-house development and define them.

Outsource software product development assumes hiring software development team located globally. Frankly, there are countless variations, like gathering niche-experienced developers from around the world and maintaining internal communication online or finding a full-fledged dedicated outsourced team as a service from a particular company.

At the same time, traditional software product development commonly assumes hiring an in-house development team located in the same region, such as your state or country.

At this point, the main difference between these two approaches lies in the location of your team. On the one hand, it is indeed the main distinction between the two models. However, the location of your employees noticeably impacts countless other factors like team management efficiency, salaries, development costs, talent pools, and the number of accessible niche-experienced developers.

When discussing the potential risks of outsource app development, we can mention potential challenges in managing your team and tracking its progress, language barriers, differences in time zones, and unclear experience and expertise.

Nevertheless, outsourced software product development is so popular because of its benefits.

Benefits of Outsourced Product Development

As mentioned, outsourced product development offers several benefits that can positively impact your business and help you achieve defined goals. To cut a long story short, the list of the main outsourced software product development benefits includes:

• Possibility to prioritize core business processes and functionality
• Access to niche-experienced developers and innovative technologies
• Enhanced software development scalability and flexibility
• Excellent cost efficiency and operational savings

Allowing Focus on Core Business Functions

One of the advantages of software product development outsourcing is the variety of reasons and tasks it can cover.

For example, businesses can choose this option when building an application from scratch. As a result, they will get a full-fledged software team to maintain software development from top to bottom.

Alternatively, software outsourcing is a popular solution for scaling projects, including developing and integrating new functionality, optimizing existing software, or other complex tasks that demand experience in working with various technologies.

So, when a business scales, it can delegate less prioritized tasks to outsourced developers, while the in-house team can deal with core business features and software solutions.

Access to Specialized Expertise and Latest Technologies

Product design outsourcing also allows businesses to integrate the latest technologies, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and others.

These innovative software solutions have many specific requirements. Moreover, the number of software engineers familiar with such technologies is limited. So, if a company wants to integrate an AI-powered virtual assistant, it has two options:

1. Finding and hiring experienced developers locally, which can be a time-intensive task
2. Contacting outsourced software product development company, experienced in AI design and development

Obviously, cooperating with dedicated software companies is a much faster solution. However, it can also help reduce costs for such development: finding and hiring niche developers is a complicated process that requires a specific budget and the time needed for the hiring process.

Finally, most outsourcing companies offer technology expertise as a service. To simplify, you can contact IT vendors for software development and IT consulting. Almost every outsourced product development company has extensive experience working with specific technologies or industries, making them experts in different types of software development, industry, and niche software.

Thus, product design outsourcing is one of many possible results of cooperating with a software development company. Cooperating with such outsourcing businesses can be beneficial not only in terms of software development from scratch. Depending on your needs and project specifics, they offer various outsourced software product development services.

Enhancing Scalability and Flexibility in Development

Outsourcing product development offers enhanced project scalability and flexibility.

One of the main reasons for such services - is to scale the development. For instance, the company might need more developers or experienced specialists to deliver the requested results.

Yet, outsourced teams are also highly flexible: these developers commonly work in undefined conditions, making them highly adaptable to new project demands or specifics. Besides, they can suggest ways to improve or optimize the development, redesign it, etc.

Still, the true potential of their flexibility can be noticed when the project tasks change rapidly, requiring the software team to adjust immediately. Outsourced developers can easily switch between tasks and responsibilities, making them an ultimate emergency team capable of fixing any issues in no time.

Achieving Cost Efficiency and Operational Savings

Outsourcing product development is a common choice among businesses with limited budgets.

When companies outsource product development, they can choose the outsourcing destination from all over the world. This helps to significantly cut expenses thanks to the differences in regional costs and salaries.

For instance, the ideal cost/quality ratio is one of the reasons for outsourcing to Ukraine: Ukrainian developers have extensive expertise in software development yet demand much lower salaries than US-based software engineers.

So, by choosing one of the most popular product design outsourcing destinations, businesses can significantly reduce operational expenses and achieve higher cost efficiency.

However, the above doesn’t explain how outsourced software product development differs from traditional development and how to find a reliable outsourced product development company.

Comprehensive Process for Outsourced Software Product Development

Outsourced product development is almost the same as traditional on-premises development. The main difference, apart from the location of your dedicated developers, is that your software team is engaged in software requirements specification and project discovery phase.

Defining Initial Project Requirements and Objectives

As we mentioned before, one of the reasons for choosing product development outsourcing is to apply and use the extensive experience of an outsourcing company.

First, each technology partner will perform project estimation and specification requirements. This helps them understand the scale and complexity of the work. Based on their experience, tech partners can suggest more efficient approaches or solutions that perfectly fit the project.

Additionally, many such software companies can offer business analysis as a service. So, apart from software development, some IT vendors can help you define the core business issues or advantages, better define goals to achieve, etc.

Choosing the Most Suitable Outsourcing Model

Software product development outsourcing can happen in a few different ways. Frankly, choosing the outsourcing model is a relatively easy and simple task with only a few variations and very apparent differences:

1. Outsourced team extension services commonly used for cases when project requires certain expertise or lacks developers.
2. Dedicated outsource software product development team when customers need to develop and integrate complex features.
3. Outsourced software product development is used by businesses for full cycle software development from scratch.

Most likely, business owners already know what type of outsourcing services they seek. Nevertheless, we recommend discussing outsourcing models with your technology partner. Judging from their experience, software companies can suggest more suited and efficient terms for cooperation, which is also based on the results of project discovery phase.

Selecting and Onboarding the Right Outsourcing Partner

The success of your project outsourcing depends on the reliability of your software partner.

Thus, as a client, you should adequately examine your development companions and their capability of delivering desired results. To select the right outsourcing partner, you should:

1. Create a list of the most interesting cooperation offers
2. Research the candidates’ experience and expertise
3. Examine the case studies and feedback on the companies
4. Interview candidates and narrow down the list
5. Choose the best offer and sign the agreement

The best way to find the ideal candidate is to choose a company with previous experience in your industry that has worked on projects similar to yours.

If you choose wisely, team onboarding and knowledge sharing won’t cause any issues or challenges. Yet, it is better to have all required documentation just in case.

Deciding When to Outsource Your Software Product Development

Outsourced software product development can be used in several cases. However, before considering hiring a full-fledged outsourced team, it is better to define the most common cases when you might need them.

When You Need Specialized Skills for Complex Projects

Aside from playing the role of “extra hands” in scaling projects, outsourced developers can bring extensive or very particular software development expertise or rare skills.

Besides, it doesn’t require hiring a big software team. Even a few outsourced developers can already bring a lot of value to your project and cover all unique demands. To rephrase, businesses can onboard a few middle or senior developers in terms of team extension to cover the need for specialized skills instead of gathering a whole development team.

Additionally, outsourced services can simplify and speed up finding niche experts. Moreover, in some rare cases, it is almost impossible to find certain specialists without outsourcing due to the lack of available professionals on the market. It is a common issue for projects that involve rare or very complex technologies.

When Tight Deadlines Require Accelerated Development

Software outsourcing is an extremely popular and beneficial choice for projects with tight deadlines when companies need software done as soon as possible. To rephrase, many businesses apply an outsourcing model when they need a faster development pace and have enough resources to cover the outsourcing expenses.

Clearly, the bigger development team is - the faster development will be. It makes it possible to delegate more features, engage more specialists in complex tasks, etc.

Once again, outsourced software product development services help to prioritize tasks, concentrate on the core functionality, and include more aspects during development.

When Your Business Needs to Scale Quickly

Outsourced software product development is an ideal option for startups and small companies with limited budgets.

Outsourcing product development for startups is possible even in the hardest scenarios when companies have limited development time or available resources. Probably every outsourced software product development company has worked on startup projects at least once.

Hiring an outsourced development team covers all the demands of a startup project and is much more competitive than maintaining in-house developers. As mentioned before, software outsourcing is cheaper and faster to set up. At the same time, such an approach offers higher and more specific expertise for a much smaller fee.

For example, an outsourced team of high-rank software engineers from Ukraine will cost almost the same as a full-fledged development crew based in the United States. Besides, potential management and progress-tracking challenges are less crucial: most outsourced teams are smaller, making their management more efficient.

Eventually, choosing to outsource seems to be the only solution for cases when businesses scale rapidly: they decrease the time required to find demanded experts. Moreover, outsourcing specialists can onboard much faster, learning the project specifics on the go.

To sum up, if you need a cheap, fast, and efficient solution for scaling your software, you must outsource.

Successful Outsourced Software Product Development with Incora

To illustrate the potential benefits of product development outsourcing, let’s consider some of our recent case studies.

Kanu: Mobile App Development Outsourcing

In our latest cooperation, we helped design and develop Kanu, a marketplace for students looking for job opportunities or opportunities to start their own businesses.

Our dedicated developers were engaged from the first day of development and helped bring the idea to life by advising on software technologies and existing solutions and, of course, taking care of full cycle software development from scratch.

Marketplace applications can be considered conventional, i.e., they share most features and services with similar apps. Nevertheless, despite the overall clarity of what to embody, building an efficient marketplace is not the simplest task. It requires specific skills and experience with such software types. Otherwise, you will face countless issues and challenges during the development and even after the software delivery.

Fortunately, our team has worked on similar projects before, so we excluded the most challenging factors and helped our clients avoid common mistakes.

VoiceOrder.ai: AI Development Outsourcing

Another project we participated in, voiceorder.ai, required integrating AI.

Long story short, voiceorder.ai is a virtual assistant that utilizes artificial intelligence for two different purposes:

• Processing voice requests
• Personalized content recommendations

Like in the previous case, our team took part in the development from scratch, helping to plan and design it, integrate a ready-made AI, and customize it to perform desired tasks.

As a result, our clients gained AI-driven software, which helped cut the development time and save operational expenses, thanks to our advisory.

To summarize, considering outsourced product development services is a great way to start any software project. Apart from offering several advantages and unique solutions, including a personalized approach, evaluating and discussing outsourced software product development services can help you learn the must-have factors and processes to include in your future project, even if you will maintain it on-premises.