Five Things to Consider When Hiring a Development Team

A development team is one of the most important parts of building any new software product or startup. Getting the right team is crucial, as developers are the people that turn ideas into something customers will be interacting with and using on a daily basis.

Hiring a bad development team will cause the costs of the project to sky-rocket, and for it to be delivered months behind schedule. Getting a decent selection of developers at the start will ensure your business gets off to good start.

Here are a number of tips for selecting a development team for your product:

1. What services are required? What can the team deliver?

The end goal of shipping your product and making money is a great one, but to reach that goal you will have to decide what services you require. Most importantly, what can the development team provide to help your business run most effectively.

Analytics can help you understand how customers are using your products. Find out if the team you want to hire can provide you with analytics, and record how your customers are using the site.

Do you require your team to have its own product manager? Does your intended team have a user interface (UI) or user experience (UX) designer to provide wireframes, and build and test prototypes?

2. What kinds of projects has the team worked on before?

Finding a team who have worked on something closely related to your idea can significantly improve how fast and effectively the product is built as they will have touched on areas before. It may be a mistake, for example, to hire a 3D games specialist to build a social network. (It happens, trust us!)

Have a look through their showcase of previous projects. Ask them what they did for each project and what kind of features they built that may help with the product you are building.

3. What is your budget? How much are the team charging?

Hiring a cheap development team is all well and good until you realise that the product they have built isn’t quite what you wanted, and doesn’t work that well either. Skimping on budget may look good on your bank balance, but soon you will realise it often costs more to look for another development team to put the product back on track.

Maybe your team haven’t planned enough to cover communicating with you and ensuring that the ideas are fully fleshed out before being implemented. Leading to my next point…

4. How does the team want to communicate?

Effective communication and keeping you in the loop is essential for the success of online startups. Thankfully we live in an age where you can voice or video call people from around the globe with ease.

Make sure you and your development team can contact each other easily, and ensure there is a clear understanding of how much communication is expected of one another from the get go. When people stop communicating, your product can soon go downhill.

Turning your idea into a list of features and wireframes can take quite a bit of time and discussion before everyone is ready to get on with their work.

Here are just a few ways in which you can communicate with your team:

• Communication
  • HipChat
  • Slack
• Feature and bug tracking
  • Sprint.ly
  • PivotalTracker
• Voice and video conferencing
  • Sqwiggle
  • Skype
  • Google Hangouts
  • WebEx
  • GoToMeeting
  • Also included in HipChat
• Screensharing
  • Screenhero
  • Join.me
  • Also included in Skype, Google Hangouts, HipChat, GoToMeeting

5. Get to know your potential team informally

It is amazing how much you can gauge about someone through an informal conversation with them.

Getting to know your development team before you hire them can be essential in understanding their background, what type of people they are, and what interests they have.

Having a good relationship with the team often boosts their efforts to make sure your business is built with love and care.