Maybe It’s Time To Fire Your US-based Developers

Andres Max

· January 9, 2018

On a typical week, I take about 3 or 4 calls from potential US-based customers who have been working for many, many months (or years) on a product they have yet to ship.

Actually it may be more calls than that. Stepping up, owning and shipping a product that another team had in their hands has turned into Ideaware’s biggest source of clients & revenue.

The problem when a product doesn’t ship boils down to one of three scenarios: a bad design/prototype, lack of process or an inadequate development team.

Out of these 3 scenarios, an inadequate development team is the one I see the most. Consequently, it is the one I help most of my clients with.

I usually ask a few questions before hand:

Where did you find your developers?

You can find great (and terrible) developers in almost any country in the world. All you have to do is jump on sites like Upwork and Toptal, and you can find individual developers.

Did you hire freelancers or a team?

Developing a product is not an easy task and requires a lot of experience and project management. My recommendation is simple:

If you are building a small, quick prototype an experienced freelance developer will suffice.

If you want to ship a large product you need a full time team. There is no other way around it. Whether the team is in-house or remote-nearshore, you will get better results from having a team working from a single location.

Someone internally needs to really own the product and be accountable.

Have you doubted your product’s launch or success?

Have you ever had a point where after months of development, money spent paying the developers you still have nothing to ship? Even worse, there is no clear launch date on the horizon.

And then you start thinking:

When will I be able to launch & make money?
Is software development really that hard?
Am I getting screwed over by the developers?
Why aren’t they building what we told them to?

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By this point it should start to become clear whether you have the right team in place or not.

But I always like to dig in deeper and find the real pain points, which I’ve learned from the US-based clients that we serve. This leads me to a small list of things to watch out for. If you feel you identify with any of these, it could be time to fix or fire.

5 signs of a bad development team (or process)

There is no established development process (scrum/agile, waterfall?) — it should be very transparent to all stakeholders what the process is.
You have not considered QA(Quality Assurance) — a bad development team will repeatedly send you buggy releases for you to review.
Releases are always late — not a single sprint is delivered on time. While some delays are OK, consistency is key.
No roadmap — playing it by ear or as you go will get you nowhere when developing software.
No design-driven development — a great user experience is the cornerstone for a successful digital product. If your team handles design as an afterthought, you are setting the product up for failure.

Fix or Fire

Every situation is different. Sometimes teams just need direction, and sometimes the entire team is not efficient. My recommended approach is simple: give your current team clear direction, an organized process, and plan out a few sprints. If the product and process do not start shaping up, it could be time to consider firing the team.