According to a report by Statista, the global outsourcing market was worth $92.5 million in 2019–a number that’s been on the rise for over a decade now. When it comes to outsourcing, companies often choose to get their product development outsourced, and for good reason. 

Building your development teams offshore not only costs less but also allows you to access a better talent pool, at scale. As a result, not just multinationals but even young companies find it more feasible to outsource their software development. 

That being said, setting a remote development team is not a piece of cake. In fact, despite its increasing popularity, the global outsourcing industry has high failure rates. Nearly 20-25% of all outsourcing engagements fail in less than two years and 50% fail within five. 

Where do they go wrong? 

Here are some of the most common mistakes that companies do while building their offshore engineering teams and how you can avoid them. 

Mistakes To Avoid While Building Your Offshore Development Teams

Mistake 1: Managing all the ropes on your own

While Google can probably give you all the information you’d need for setting up a remote engineering team, it cannot replace hands-on experience. First and foremost, establishing your presence and attracting talent in a distant land could take time. In addition to that, setting up policies and processes that conform to the local laws and culture can be difficult and something or the other might slip out. 

After all, there’s a lot more on your plate apart from building your development team, and you can’t tackle all the ropes alone. That’s where an offshore partner can help you. Always go for a partner who has experience in team formation and the knowledge of the region you want to build your team in. For instance,  our founder, Sandeep Deshmukh, has experience in hiring and building teams for several startups and finding over 100+ dextrous engineers for them. Born and brought up in India, Sandeep has worked with plenty of US-based companies to help bridge the gap between the east and the west smoothly. 

Mistake 2: Keeping a narrow reach

More often than not, companies instinctively find it more convenient to outsource their product needs to a nearby location to avoid time zone issues and cultural barriers. For instance, a US company would try to seek talent from Canada. That’s a huge mistake. Once you’ve decided to offshore your development, proximity should no longer be a deciding factor in choosing where to set up your engineering team. 

Instead, the quality of talent and operational costs should be the key aspects that you should consider. 

India, for instance, is a great choice to set up engineering teams. Producing over 1.5 million engineers into the job market every year, India provides quality talent at scale–a must-have for building product teams. India has the largest pool of English speaking software engineers to offer at a much less cost than other countries. As a matter of fact, the cost of living in India is 68% less than that in the US. This impacts the cost of acquiring talent too. Offshore engineers can get you the same, if not better, results at a much lesser cost than your homeland. 

Mistake 3: Valuing everything based on costs

There’s a difference between going for the lower costs and choosing the option with the lowest costs. More often than not, companies end up making costs incurred as the sole deciding factor while choosing their offshore partner. As a result, in all likelihood, there’s a possibility that the match is not the right fit for your requirements. While it is important to consider costs, all weigh in the pros and cons of your choices and understand the nitty-gritty of the process they follow. 

Some of the questions to consider when choosing your offshore team building partner could be: 

• Are there any value-added services being provided?
• What kind of experience does the partner offer?
• How thorough is their recruiting process and how do they do a quality check while acquiring talent?
• What kind of additional operational help can the partner provide? 

Always remember, a remote team in India, would anyway cost you much less than one in your home country. So, while building the remote team, don’t compromise on quality for a minor additional cost-saving. Instead, value compatibility and skills over everything else. 

Mistake 4: Thinking only of the short term successes

When you decide to offshore your development, there are several types of engagement you can choose from. Most teams end up using offshore services as a ‘quick-fix’ solution instead of long-term support that they can use. While it is easier to partner with a development team on a project basis and get your work done, it only fulfills your short term needs. 

As a software-based company, you must align your offshore development team to your long term goals and consider building a reliable offshore engineering team that can help your product grow beyond imagination. 

It is always better to consider your offshore team as full-time, permanent engineers that you’re adding to your workforce instead of treating them as one-time product allies. Consider choosing partners that help you build your own team instead of fulfilling your one-off product needs. 

For instance, at TeemGenie we help you build and manage a permanent dedicated team solely for your product needs, that match your cultural values and required skill-set. It is not a project-based engagement for specific development needs. That way, you can set a roadmap for your team for the next 2-5 years and work towards it. 

Mistake 5: Ignoring the importance of the right tools

Often remote teams end up working in silos and are not aligned to the company values and vision. As a result, companies start facing a lot of challenges and end up discontinuing remote operations. What many fail to realize is that the issue lies not in the remote team but in the kind of processes and tools that are established to manage the remote team. 

Effective offshore operations can only be set up if you have the right tools to take care of two major work-processes: communication and project management. For day-to-day communication, you have tools like Teams, Slack, Zoom, and Skype to stay connected with your remote employees. Similarly, you have Jira and Trello to allocate tasks and manage progress. Putting these tools together and establishing an adequate process before you set foot in the offshore area and help you avoid a lot of hurdles while managing your remote engineering team. 

To Sum Up

As software development technology advances, finding the right pool of engineers to grow your product will become more difficult than ever, especially when the world is competing for premium talent from the same talent pool. Therefore, it becomes necessary to build the right association with a partner that can help you scout through the engineering market and help you in not only finding the right people to build your software but also in retaining them. 

We understand the challenges of building an offshore team. If you are looking to build your engineering team in India, we can help. With experience in tech-hiring and working with plenty of startups, we focus on finding people that match not only your product needs but also align with your company culture.  Explore TeemGenie and let’s connect on how we can together build the perfect remote team for your product needs.