We’ve all been there. A great idea, itching to get to market, but building a kick-ass development team is hard and super expensive.
In theory, outsourcing is a very attractive alternative. Think about it – you can scale pretty much infinitely, move up or down as you need, hire very specific skill sets like a UI/UX designer or a reporting developer for as much time as you need.
Except that it hardly ever turns out that way. Outsourcing often fails and there are more stories of heartache and frustration than of success. Typical IT services companies pitching for outsourcing work seldom get product development. A deep understanding of domain, the problem the product is trying to solve, quick iterations, getting to market for validation and reacting quickly are very important attributes, which most of them don’t have. They look at it like a set of requirements to be coded and get paid for. Quickly the relationship devolves into one-off scope management fights.
Ideas2IT was born out of this very problem: Our founder’s frustration when he was trying to develop a product for data center management. After repeated attempts to outsource it, he started Ideas2IT to make outsourcing a very focused science aimed at product development.
Over the years, we fine-tuned our model and now have a finely crafted approach for successful product development for cutting edge startups. Here is how we do it:
1. Focus
We will only pick projects where we have an unfair advantage to succeed. This means focusing on specific domains and technology stacks that we have expertise in. For instance, if you ask us to build a massive multiplayer online game, we will turn you down because we just don’t get game development. But a highly scalable distributed architecture for Fog Computing? That’s right up our alley.
2. People
Our founder being an ex-Googler applied a lot of what he had learned at Google, including the approach to building a top-notch team. We call it Google-lite. From the way we screen the people (yes, it’s super hard to get into Ideas2IT!) to nurturing them and providing them with great opportunities, people are our strength
3. Domain Expertise
When starting a project, we invest a lot of time in understanding the domain, pain point our customer is trying to solve and their secret sauce. We don’t look at the solution as a set of features to be developed.
4. Solutioning Approach
We don’t passively wait for the customer to tell us in detail what he wants; we engage proactively and bring ideas to the table. Many of our employees are ex-startup guys who have taken their own products to market. So we naturally bring lot of ideas and solutions to the table.
5. Investing in Technology
We always try to evaluate what the next big high-end tech is, and invest our own time and money building competencies. For instance, we developed Machine Learning capabilities when people were still talking about Hadoop, by hiring rock solid PhDs and Data Scientists, and started investing in Blockchain even before all the fad by forming a partnership with a Blockchain consulting company. So we have ready-made skills that customers can leverage to roll out compelling features.
6. Process
We call our process “Just enough process”. We don’t have an onerous process list, but enough so that product development can happen in a reliable way. There are very clearly defined principles such as lead with visual design, show early show often and so on.
Over the years, we’ve gotten really good at building products, and have clients from across startups and enterprises that trust us blindly. If you’re looking for a hundred Java developers to flesh out an application based on a spec doc, look elsewhere. If you want a technology partner to proactively help you build and scale your product, give us a shot!