Partner Profile : Scaleup Dev team
How do I scale up my Dev team quickly when the Series A funding has landed?
The partner network in the Canopy Community helps our members to solve problems quicker and better. Each partner is well known before we recommend them. You can be sure of a trusted partner who is startup friendly and who is a proactive contributor to the community as a whole. These partners are “citizen organisations”.
The founders of these partner companies are also typically members of #tribe.
Problem
How do I scale up my Dev team quickly when the Series A funding has landed?
You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs as the saying goes, but in this moment the eggs you are going to break might just be real people and ones that you care about too. So it’s probably good to not repeat the mistakes many founder teams have made before.
Typically at this stage the Dev team is just a few people and everyone is a bit fried from getting through the seed stage. They are now faced with bigger task lists and urgent deadlines, and have only had a moment to pause since the funding round closed.
This moment is not just about how you scale up but also about how you don’t break the people that made it all work so far. You’ve got to move, and move fast to go from hero culture to appropriate systems and process.
Solution
Start by recognising your existing team as the brain trust of the organisation. These are the people that know the most about the code and also the customer context. This is very valuable and where they will play best is in creating the vision for the product, creating the architectural model and solving problems.
The brain trust will have put together a product roadmap as part of the funding round. Look at that roadmap and see which bits are able to be outsourced, and which aren’t. Look for pieces of the roadmap that are as independent as possible, perhaps also requiring unique skills that the brain trust don’t yet have. These are all perfect for outsourcing.
Ideally you will establish 2 to 4 outsource partners which can take on these bits of the roadmap as complete pieces of work. The problem of getting each unit of work done is then becoming a supplier management challenge for the brain trust, not a code and delivery task. This is more scalable and resilient. If you’re open to it try to blend suppliers from different geographies to give greater time zone coverage and price point arbitrage.
Now you have several tracks of work going in parallel the overall velocity of your roadmap development should be much improved. There are also greater windows for rest and reflection for the brain trust.
With everything moving, you can now think through who you want to hire, how to find them, how to manage their induction into the company and how to phase them in, and which outsource partner to phase out. The timing on all this will be overshadowed by the level of funding in your series A, but it does enable you to be more ‘human’ in how you do things and still keep investor expectations on track.
You might consider help from the outsource partner in the form of:
CTO as a Service
Development team outsourcing
Test and QA outsourcing
Security and penetration testing
Architecture review and audit.
Commercial models that you can consider include
Time and materials
Fixed price
Risk and reward.
Partner options
India - Rhibhus - Speak with Manoj
Portugal - We are Meta - Speak with Catarina
UK - DG Solutions - Speak with Jana.
If you are looking to take on this approach at a smaller scale you can also operate using freelancers and remote workers from platforms such as Fiverr Upwork or Toptal. Just remember this is closer to being task management rather than outsourcing. It’s less scalable and resilient as a result.
Canopy reflections
It’s not easy to work with a third party outsource company. You need to be clear about what you want as an outcome, and how you measure it. You also need to track them - not micro manage. This is a very different thing.
Supplier management is much more scalable than building a team. It is also quicker to start than a recruitment process.
When you are integrating each supplier remember to keep their work as isolated from each other as possible - you don’t want dependencies linking / stopping them.
This approach buys you a window of opportunity to recruit carefully and selectively. This helps reduce churn long term and fills your brain trust with awesome people that fit well culturally. In 6 to 12 months you may have phased some or all of the 3rd parties away, as your team has grown.
Maybe you’ve not deployed capital / spent money like this before? The trick to making this model work successfully is the investment you make in the account management with the outsource provider. How you manage that relationship will be essential. Make sure they understand and appreciate your context and timelines. Keep them regularly informed and show how you value the work they are doing. This will help you get the best from the money you are spending.