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 project without the need to maintain an in-house team. It works particularly well for ambitious, innovative projects.