Extended Software Development Team: Tactical Playbook for Your Business

Despite a steady trend for remote work and in-house tech talent hiring from budget-friendly regions, companies still struggle with having the right people at the right time. In 2024, when access to the global talent pool was already table stakes, 41% of businesses couldn’t fill in the needed positions.

However, almost no one relies solely on their internal sources anymore. 96% of companies resort to outsourcing. With an extended development team, they get the right experts up for grabs whenever they need them, at a price they are willing to pay.

What are the options within the team extension model, and when does it make the most sense? Our all-out guide backs theory with our clients’ real-life examples. 

What is an extended team?

The extended team is a flexible way of acquiring talents from an outsourcing vendor when you need access to niche skills and on-the-dot scalability without added operational expenses. The individual experts or fully-packed teams act under your complete control or autonomously to support the efforts of your existing IT department — short-term or long-term.   

Many faces of extended teams 

While there are numerous ways to expand the capacity and capabilities of your core team, two options always stay relevant – IT staff augmentation and a dedicated development team.

IT staff augmentation

IT staff augmentation is a team extension strategy that implies bringing external specialists as a stopgap or extra hands to supplement your in-house team and take on a specific part of a project. The invited experts blend in with your workforce, adopt your project management tools, and operate under the direct guidance of your project manager.

Dedicated team

A dedicated team model operates as a self-managed squad of IT professionals, handling a particular project or set of projects. They can undertake the entire development process, from concept analysis to deployment and upkeep. While acting as an independent entity, the external team adopts the same level of work transparency as your in-house unit.  

For companies looking to scale beyond a single team, an offshore development center (ODC) offers an opportunity for strategic expansion of their business. Compared to the aforementioned options, this format provides a full-fledged remote engineering hub with top-tier and inimitably secure infrastructure. 

Benefits of the extended team model, explained

The reasons for hiring an extended development team boil down to gaining access to expertise and efficiency, and unlocking opportunities that were off-limits earlier. The highs of this outsourcing approach include: 

• On-demand flexibility and scalability. When the backlog overflows with must-do mundane tasks, your core team gives its all to put out the fires. Meanwhile, innovative ideas await their turn (no one knows when it will come). 

An extended team can be upsized or, vice versa, shrunk back in days, allowing you to cover both ongoing mandatory tasks and new projects.  

• Cost-efficiency. Ease the financial burden by paying for what you get, excluding overheads associated with hiring an in-house team, such as sick leaves, employee benefits, training costs, etc. 
• No time-draining hiring process. On average, you’ll need up to 49 days to find a suitable candidate for a software engineer position. 

If settling on the development team extension, you get cherry-picked specialists for your project in days without screening scads of applications, running background checks on the candidates, and going through several rounds of interviews.  

• Easy and quick access to niche expertise. Modernizing legacy software without any knowledge keepers of this age-old tech left in the company or developing an innovative solution when you’re short on the experts in a linchpin technology can be challenging, if not impossible. The extended team model implies you can turn to aces with a specific skill set every now and then.  
• Ability to calibrate the level of your control over a project. Project management involvement depends on the chosen cooperation model. IT staff augmentation requires an in-house manager to guide a mixed team of internal and external experts and monitor their progress on a regular basis. Meanwhile, with a self-managed dedicated development team, the level of control can vary — daily check-ins, bi-weekly demos, or anything in between.  

7 real-world scenarios suitable for a development team extension

There may be one or a combination of factors to tip the scales in favor of the extended development team model. Backed by decades of experience in the B2B tech market, we can confirm seven most common cases in which businesses benefit from the team extension.   

1. You want to roll out an MVP ahead of competitors

Scouring the market for extra hands is probably the last thing you’d want to add to your plate at crunch time when all your efforts are focused on rolling your software before your competitors do. The extended team is a quick fix that will help you balance the workload of your in-house employees. 

For instance, one of our clients, a robotics manufacturer, wanted to present an innovative, highly maneuverable model of a driverless forklift system at the industry trade show in just six weeks. Outsourcing web development was the only way to meet the tight deadline. Their in-house team was in charge of crafting a service for robot coordination, and developing a service for data presentation was beyond their capacity. With no extra time and margin for error, the client needed a squad of seasoned experts to jump on board in a flash and build a data presentation service right at first try. 

• They contacted *instinctools for an extended team of senior software developers and UX/UI designers. 
• Our dedicated team built the service for data presentation ahead of schedule. 
• However, the client’s core team hit a bottleneck. Their standard practice of testing software on hardware slowed them down, keeping the project in limbo.
• We suggested temporarily replacing the service for robot coordination with an emulator to have the whole project ready in time, and acted on this idea. An MVP was presented at the LogiMat and proved to be a trailblazing warehouse solution for the SMB segment.

2. Your existing team is too swamped to take on the innovations

If innovative projects keep sinking lower in the backlog under the pressure of routine tasks, they risk going into oblivion eventually. Considering that innovations are the driving force behind progress (and business profit growth), you can’t give up on experimenting. 

Bolstering your in-house IT squad with several external experts or an entire outsourced team is one of the ways to unburden your core personnel of mundane chores.   

3. You have time and budget limitations that can’t be violated

McKinsey highlights that, on average, IT projects run 75% over the initial budget and stretch delivery schedule by 46%. We’ve seen it happen over and over again — tight timelines and shrinking budgets putting businesses in a bind. By opting for the development team extension, you can tackle both challenges in one strategic move.

4. You want to test a raw hypothesis without sacrificing first-priority tasks 

What happens when a promising business idea emerges, but your internal team is already at full capacity and can’t afford to pause their main tasks to test its potential? Stretching your IT department to its limits is far from a good move. This is where an external team can give a hand — handling side projects to assess feasibility without disrupting your primary operations.  

5. Your in-house team can’t tackle an unexpected workload spike 

Last-minute changes in the project scope, bugs that slipped into the customers’ environments, an unplanned system outage, and a myriad of other unforeseen factors can put pressure on your internal IT department.  

Pushing your existing team to work in survival mode might work for a while, but if the workload surge lasts, you risk topping it all with employee burnout. 

Going with the development team extension is the right call when your IT squad operates at capacity, but there’s no need to hire in-house to handle temporary surges. That way, you can bring in seasoned external experts right when it counts, keeping your workload balanced and your projects on track.

6. You don’t have the right expertise on tap

If you need a subject matter expert for a one-off task, going through the hassle of in-house hiring doesn’t seem reasonable. Employing niche specialists on the internal team may also be off the table due to budget constraints. In such cases, the extended team model is a go-to option to expand your capabilities range with any tech knowledge quickly and on budget-friendly terms.

One of our clients, an AgTech startup, created an AI-powered plant monitoring system under strong in-house leadership. However, they lacked professionals to develop a web app with greenhouse visualization. 

• Instinctools assembled a team of a business analyst, software architect, and product designer who acted under direct guidance and complete control of the product’s CTO.
• We crafted a solution with a real-time, two-layered map, enabling farmers to track plants’ health status and environmental conditions simultaneously. 
• By leveraging our MVP development services in USA, the startup successfully built the first software for harmless and seamless plant monitoring for farms with 10,000–15,000 plants.

7. You seek control without micromanagement

Striking the balance between control and trust may be tricky for a manager. Lean too much toward control, and you’ll find yourself micromanaging. Give too much trust, and you might end up with a team that lacks direction and struggles to meet deadlines. 

A practical solution is to bring in experienced professionals who understand their roles and deliver quality work without constant supervision. With self-managed extended teams, you get specialists who are not only experts in their field but also skilled in structured collaboration and accountability.

Second-guessing the development team extension? We’ve got all the answers you need

Do the extended team model benefits sound too good, making you suspicious of possible trade-offs? Yes, a murky outsourcing company may promise big but deliver blah. But stalwart vendors welcome open communication and are always ready to walk together through all of your concerns to resolve them. 

Here are the concerns we usually hear from business and product owners, venturing into outsourcing for the first time and puzzling over how to choose the right software development partner. 

• “What if the extended team doesn’t match our expectations?” 

A trusted outsourcing partner doesn’t wait for a step-by-step guide regarding their clients’ team-related preferences. Don’t get us wrong – it’s great if you have one. But even if you don’t, it’s the vendor’s job to initiate a dialog, unveiling any unwritten expectations about the new team members’ skills, and make sure every specialist checks the right boxes. Some outsourcing companies also offer trial periods, providing you with room for change along the way.

• “Instead of easing our workload, won’t they just create more hand-holding for our in-house experts?” 

This issue won’t arise if you cooperate with a seasoned outsourcing company that has been in business for a long time. Such vendors offer specialists who have dealt with all kinds of corporate software, development and project management tools, and, therefore, are ready to bring results from day one.

• “How do we know the extended team isn’t working in the dark?”

Any reliable outsourcing vendor values their hard-earned reputation above all and is interested in turning you into a loyal customer who will seek their services again. That’s why, don’t hesitate to demand full visibility from your development provider — cameras on during meetings, time-tracking tools for accurate billing, and open communication at every step. 

• “Can an extended development team meet our security standards?”

If security is your top priority, look for a development company, whose services are compliant with major data privacy and software security regulations and whose commitment to delivering high-quality and ultra-secure software is confirmed by ISO 27000 family of standards and NIST 800 certification. 

To sift out shady vendors, check their market reputation and study verified client reviews on trusted platforms like Clutch or GoodFirms, to name a few.

How to set up an extended team in three steps? 

Hiring an external team or filling skill gaps with individual outsourced developers is a piece of cake.   

• Submit the request. Proper resource estimation and a clear understanding of project objectives are prerequisites for fruitful cooperation. Therefore, at the initial stage, the vendor clarifies the details, such as specialists’ hourly rates and location, the number of FTEs, project objectives, timeline, and expected deliverables.  
• Select specialists. You choose from the list of pre-selected experts, whose tech and communication skills fit your requirements. If you need a full-fledged dedicated development team, the outsourcing provider assembles one. After roles and responsibilities are identified, you make final agreements on the deliverables and KPIs.   
• Start cooperation. In case of staff augmentation, the time new team members will need to blend into your IT team and adapt to your operational processes depends on the specialists’ experience level — the higher it is, the quicker they settle. The dedicated team sets up tracking and reporting systems and initiates the first sprint independently.

Get things done with an extended development team model

Whether you need to free up your core team, tap into specialized skills, beat the clock, stay within the agreed budget, or do all of the above, extended teams are up for the task. IT staff augmentation will be the best fit for product owners who prefer to stay in full control. Those, who’d like to hand off the management hassle, should choose a dedicated team model.