Dedicated Development Teams
An experienced team working in your codebase from the first month.
Sometimes you need more capacity than you have, for longer than a project lasts. A dedicated team of engineers who have done this before works in your tools and your process, delivering against your roadmap for a fixed monthly cost.
What you end up with
- Add delivery capacity in weeks instead of the months that hiring takes
- Keep one team on your product for the long run, with the same faces in the stand-up
- Budget on a fixed monthly cost, and scale it up or down on a month's notice
- Keep the knowledge in your organisation, because documentation and hand-over are part of the job from the start
Most projects start with a fixed-price discovery, so you have a scoped plan and an estimate in hand before you commit to a build.
Overview
Where a dedicated team fits between hiring and outsourcing
Some work has a clear scope and nobody free to do it. Often the roadmap is simply bigger than the team. Sometimes a product line needs its own squad, or a platform migration would starve everything else if the existing team took it on. Hiring takes months, and the candidate you wanted has a counter-offer by the time the paperwork is done. Contractors arrive one at a time and leave with everything they learned. If you outsource the whole thing instead, it disappears behind a project manager and comes back different from what you asked for.
A dedicated team sits between those. We put together a small senior group, typically a tech lead, two to four engineers, and a designer or tester when the work calls for it. They work in your repositories and ticketing system, join your stand-ups and ship through your deployment process. You judge them on what ships, and they stay as long as the work does. Everything they learn goes into your wiki and your engineers' heads from the first week, so when they eventually leave the knowledge does not go with them.
What's included
The kinds of work this covers.
- 01
Team composition built around the work
A tech lead plus engineers across front-end, back-end, mobile, data or infrastructure, with product design and QA added when the roadmap needs them. We size the team to the work and change it when the roadmap changes.
- 02
Embedded in your process and tools
Your GitHub or Azure DevOps, Jira or Linear, Slack, sprint length and review standards, as they are. If we see something that would help, we will say so, but we will not turn up with a process of our own.
- 03
Structured ramp-up
Two to three weeks of onboarding on the architecture, the domain, the environments and how you work, with the first pull requests merged inside the first fortnight so you can see something moving early.
- 04
Delivery leadership and accountability
A named lead who is responsible for the team's output, its technical direction and the conversation with your stakeholders. You have one point of contact for the whole engagement, and we keep that person on it.
- 05
Knowledge transfer by design
Architecture decision records, documentation, pairing with your engineers and recorded walkthroughs, so your team could take over at any point without falling off a cliff.
- 06
Flexible scaling and exit
Scale the team up for a launch or down after a migration on a month's notice. There is a written off-boarding process and nothing in the contract that keeps you.
Is it right for you?
A good fit if
- Your roadmap has outgrown your team, and hiring is too slow or too uncertain to close the gap
- You want a stable team on a product or platform for years, with no gap between projects
- You have been burned by outsourced delivery or by contractors who kept churning
- Your own engineers need more experienced people around them to raise standards and pace
- You need to run a big initiative without stalling the day-to-day work
How we approach it
The steps between a first call and go-live.
Scope the team
A short conversation about your roadmap, stack, process and constraints. We come back with a team shape, a monthly cost and a start date, usually four to six weeks out.
Ramp up
Onboarding into your codebase, domain and tools. Agreeing the definition of done, the review standards and how often we report. Then a few small changes shipped to prove the pipeline works.
Deliver and report
Sprint by sprint against your priorities. The lead reports progress, risks and forecasts in a format your stakeholders can read in five minutes, and retrospectives include your people as well as ours.
Adjust or hand over
Regular reviews of the team's shape and whether it is still paying for itself. Scale up, scale down, hand over to your in-house team on a plan, or carry on, all on a month's notice.
Deliverables
What you'll have at the end.
- Team proposal with roles, a named lead and the monthly cost
- Onboarding plan with ramp-up milestones
- Code merged and released every sprint, in your repositories
- Sprint reports covering progress, risks and forecasts
- Architecture decision records and documentation that is kept up to date
- Knowledge-transfer and off-boarding plan
Typical stack
The tools we tend to use for this.
Related work
Projects that used this service.
Questions
Questions about this service.
How is this different from staff augmentation?
Staff augmentation gives you individuals by the hour. You manage them, and when one leaves you absorb the churn. A dedicated team comes with a lead, shared standards, responsibility for what ships and a commitment to keeping the same people on it. If someone does rotate off, we handle the overlap and the hand-over before you notice a gap.
How much does a dedicated team cost?
Pricing is a fixed monthly fee per role. A typical team of a lead and three engineers falls between £45k and £75k a month depending on experience and specialisms. Design, QA and infrastructure roles are added when needed and priced the same way.
Where is the team based and what hours do they work?
Our engineers are in the UK or in European time zones that overlap with it, and they work your core hours. Stand-ups, reviews and pairing happen live. Nobody waits overnight for an answer to a question.
How quickly can a team start, and what is the minimum commitment?
Typically four to six weeks between signing and the first day, and faster if we have people coming off another engagement. We ask for an initial three months. After that it is a rolling month's notice either way.
What happens if we want to bring the work in-house?
That is one of the outcomes we plan for. Documentation and pairing happen throughout, and the off-boarding plan includes an overlap period with your new hires so nothing gets dropped. Several clients have done exactly this.
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