All About Product Scaling & Maturity

Product Scaling: Routine For Outsourcers, Essential Tasks For Employees

The project is scaled up; we have new resources, the number of teams is growing, we can invest more in full-time employees. And when the choice arose: to invest resources in outsourcing or our state, we chose the latter.

Working with outsourcers in the same role, and compared to our internal employees, becomes less effective. And we are moving to a different format of work – we transfer mainly routine tasks to outsourcers: technical debt, unit testing, deployment. Critical and creative studies remain for staff members. We worked according to this scheme for another six months or a year.

Product Maturity: Outsourcing For Local Tasks

Our team has grown to 100 people, the project has gained recognition in the market, and outsourcing has two new functions.

Sub-Hire While Searching For New Employees

At this time, interns, junior-level specialists, that is, employees performing tasks at the entry-level, appeared in our team. And we began to use the elasticity of outsourcing – sub-hiring outsourcers for those periods when there are not enough specialists.

For example, new staffing rates are negotiated once a quarter or a year. After hiring specialists has been agreed upon, it takes time to find them – 3-4 months. For this period, you can give new tasks to outsourcers.

Contracts with outsourcers allow us to reduce the risks associated with the long-term filling of vacancies: we take them on outsourcing during the absence of our resources.

Life hacks :

1. At this stage, a separate person appears who fully administers the work with outsourcers. He has agreements with everyone, terms of employment.
2. All outsourcing teams are interviewed, we have a portfolio of all specialists so that, if necessary, we can give a task to the right person.

Hiring Outsourcers With Exclusive Expertise

Now that the project has grown, each new module or unique product can be developed by a team of 4-5 people. We find outsourcers not by function, for example, DevOps, Kubernetes, frontend, but by the availability of exclusive expertise in narrow areas that are interesting to us, for example, building custom SDN solutions. To assemble such a team into the staff would take a lot of effort to find and hire.

In this case, outsourcers solve narrow problems locally, in some modules, completely close them. They are integrated into our team at all stages of development. All outsourced processes are built like in our scrum team: they have their planning, backlog grooming, calls, a retrospective discussion where we discuss the project. The section closes its tasks iteratively with sprints.

Outsourcing Is A Resource That Needs To Be Used Effectively

Outsourcing is a tool that a manager must evaluate from the point of view of strategic product development. Make sure that the company can use it as efficiently as possible at every stage. Our project, the VK cloud platform, has gone from MVP to a mature and developed product, and at each stage, we consciously chose the most appropriate style of using outsourcers.

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