How to Work With a Nearshore Development Team Without Friction
Learn more about the nearshore development team model and how to set up cooperation in the right way. Let us share some practical tips on initialising and managing a project.
How to Work With a Nearshore Development Team Without Friction
When businesses consider hiring a remote vendor, nearshore software development is often a less common choice than offshore. Based on this recent report, the offshore segment dominates the market with a 59% revenue share, while nearshore teams account for only 15%. Nevertheless, team extension in nearshore locations is the fastest-growing outsourcing segment that will continue to gain popularity in the following years. More companies are seeking geographical proximity, cultural compatibility, and real-time collaboration.
Worry that hiring a nearshore software engineering team will still affect your productivity? We have been working with this model for years, and know how to set up smooth collaboration. Find practical insights on how to set up nearshore software development and make it work in our blog post.
How Does Working With a Nearshore Team Look Like?
Let's start with a brief summary of what is nearshore software development. The nearshore team model is when you hire a team in a location close to your home country. It has the same or a similar time zone, or may even speak the same language. A common approach in Western Europe is to collaborate with engineers from Central or Eastern Europe for nearshore product development. Companies from the US often go to Latin American engineering vendors for the same reasons. It's close and easy to stay in touch.
How does working with nearshore teams look in real life?
Suppose you are a startup with a limited budget and need to quickly develop an MVP to reach the market. Launching development in your home country is challenging due to high rates and fierce competition for qualified software engineers. Given that a nearshore development company already has engineers available for new projects and can kick-start much faster, the benefits of outsourcing are evident.
An alternative case is when you have part of the engineering team in-house and need to scale quickly to meet rapid project growth. Outsourcing MVP development to a remote team is a feasible solution for finding experienced engineers more quickly and often at a lower cost.
Therefore, the most common reasons for working with a nearshore development center are cost optimization and higher flexibility. You can hire remote engineers for a specific part of a custom software development project without the need to maintain an in-house team. It works particularly well for ambitious, innovative projects.
Setting up Cooperation With a Nearshore Development Team
Der Erfolg steht und fällt mit dem Setup. Wenn du Ziele, Anforderungen und Verantwortlichkeiten klar formulierst, arbeitet ein Nearshore-Team ohne Reibung mit deinem internen Team zusammen.
1. Analyze your business goals
Moving a part of your business to another location is a common yet still impactful business decision. Ask yourself what problems you are trying to solve with a nearshore software development team. Difficulties hiring in-house? Need for cost optimization? Or maybe finding someone with rare tech expertise or speeding up feature delivery? Finding answers to these questions should help you determine whether nearshore development is the right business strategy, define the goals of the cooperation, and estimate the ROI.
2. Specify project requirements and responsibilities
Run business analysis to finalize your product concept if you haven't done it yet. It's necessary to know the project scope, gather and validate requirements, and set success metrics. Proactive analysis also streamlines communication between different parts of the team and prevents rework. You get more control over the budget and scope, which minimizes the risks of remote cooperation.
3. Consider several locations and companies
Analyze the market to understand what different companies can offer. You shouldn't go to dozens of nearshore teams. Ask for recommendations, gather feedback, and shortlist several options. Then schedule calls with their reps to discuss the terms of potential cooperation and understand whether they meet your business goals. Usually, you can directly talk to potential candidates before hiring remote engineers, which gives you an additional opportunity to find out whether they suit you and have the necessary skills.
4. Test the cooperation for several months
Once you select the vendor to start nearshore application development, keep a close eye on how they work for the starting period. Trust is important, but you must ensure the remote engineers are meeting deadlines and delivering the expected value to your company.
Tips to Make Nearshore Application Development Smoother
When offering nearshore outsourcing development, we analyzed the effectiveness of different approaches and identified the best practices shared below. If you want to run a nearshore team without friction, you should have clear product requirements, assign a project manager, continuously stay in touch with your nearshore team, and follow other tips.
Incorporate them into your processes. If you have an in-house engineering team and hire nearshore engineers as an extension, make sure to align their work. It will make the collaboration more productive and help avoid miscommunication or overlapping responsibilities.
Ensure you can provide the necessary access at the project start. Delayed access is a major issue that slows nearshore development teams and delivery. To avoid prolonged downtime, you must set up project access governance beforehand.
Set clear goals and timelines. Specify the deliverables, deadlines, and success metrics in the contract and communicate them to the nearshore software company you partner with. It helps both parties to stay on the same page and achieve the expected result.
Use collaboration software and standardized processes. Remote team members should use the same tools, documents, coding standards, and workflows. It simplifies management and benefits productivity.
Have a project manager. Assign a project manager yourself or ask the nearshore development team to provide one. This role is essential for coordinating the engineering team and stakeholders throughout the project, monitoring software quality, and meeting deadlines.
Scalors For Building a Nearshore Team
Scalors is a German company with a strong presence in the European and US markets. We can provide high-quality nearshore development services to businesses in both regions. Our team offers custom software development across multiple domains, from AI implementation to web and mobile app development. You can ask us to assemble a dedicated remote team or staff specific engineers with the required expertise.
We have built software for the cruise ship industry, online fashion, AI-based legal research, and other domains you can read about in our case studies.Schedule a free consulting session with Scalors to discuss nearshore development and other cooperation options.
