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Introduction

According to Gartner’s recent research, remote workers will comprise 32% of product development teams globally. More than 50% of the total product development workforce will work in a hybrid work environment. As tech startups are struggling to retain talent in an environment where large corporations are providing extremely competitive compensations and benefits, remote working comes as a ray of hope for these startups where remote working is an extremely desirable work benefit for many product development employees. The term ‘remote product development’ is getting increasingly popular these days owing to the major adoption of the model by many young start-ups and tech enterprises.

Bringing together a product development team is essential if you have a product idea and want to turn it into a full-fledged product that meets all your expectations (quality, budget, performance, time, etc.). Remote product development is the ideal solution for companies with talent dispersed throughout the globe. Read this blog to learn how you can leverage remote product development to your advantage, and how to start building a remote product development team.

What is Remote Product Development?

Remote product development is the process of having your product developed somewhere other than your company’s physical location. You outsource your new product development to product development professionals in scattered geographies and not limited to the vicinity of your office but those who are a part of your organization. Outsourced product development on the other hand is when you outsource your product development to technology professionals for some other organization and in this model either you or the outsourced vendor could be responsible for the technology development.

It could be the office of a company to which you have outsourced your product’s development or a video conference with everyone on the team working from different locations. Tech startups can now have their products developed by the best minds on the planet, even if they are thousands of miles apart.

Why Should You Build Remote Product Development Teams?

While remote product development teams had not gained a lot of momentum before the pandemic, a lot of organizations were forced to work from home. During this time, a lot of benefits came into the spotlight for remote working and encapsulate the idea of why remote working is beneficial and has become a standard for many tech companies today. Let us take a look at why remote product development is gaining momentum among the leaders of tech organizations.

Access to Extended Capabilities and Talents: As tech companies look to assemble teams, it could be frustrating to limit yourself to your vicinity to look for the niche talent you require. If this is the case, you have to spend time training these resources and spend more money. However, with remote product development, location stops being a barrier for you to be able the right talent for your product development requirements. Moreover, outsourced product development and the flexibility it provides with extended team’s engagement models as well as the capacity to provide you with experienced and talented resources to immediately start working on your product is unparalleled.

Diverse Perspectives: Having access to remote resources also allows you to leverage the opinions and perspectives of different geographies with different practices. This can help you optimize your product for the market. Being limited to a particular region will limit your product development practices established only in that region. However, remote resources can contribute to the optimization of your product so it can be end-user friendly for various geographical locations.

Reducing Time to Market: Leveraging remote product development teams reduces turnaround time for a lot of parameters such as onboarding resources and executing tasks. Needless to say, this will have a direct impact on the time it takes to launch your product in the market.

Access to the Latest Tools and Technologies: With remote product development, you can leverage outsourced product development and extended team capabilities. These service providers help tech startups leverage the latest technology for product success. With remote teams, you can ensure that you have the expertise that can help you leverage the latest tools and technologies.

Controlled Costs: Perhaps the most important aspect of onboarding resources is the expenses involved. When working with outsourced development and extended team service providers, you will have a clear idea of what compensation it is that you have to provide the resources as you can leverage flexible engagement models with your provider. You do not have to worry anymore about details such as negotiating salaries, providing relocation and accommodation benefits, etc. Instead, you can focus on more value-driving benefits that help in the retention of these resources and improve productivity.

Managing Remote Product Teams

We all know that remote product development has a lot of advantages. However, how do you go about finding the ideal team to work on your product? You can meet in-house resources in person and assess whether they’d be a good fit for your firm, its work culture, and other factors if you hire an in-house team. However, putting together a remote team for product development can be difficult. Read on to learn more about how to manage remote product development teams

Have a Solid Screening Process: Before you start assembling your remote product development team, make sure you develop a screening framework that vets the resource for all the niche skills you need. This is not just about technical skills, but also their soft skills such as communication.

To integrate a holistic approach to screening and interviewing remote resources, check their technical communication skills, their previous experience with working remotely, their familiarity with remote communication tools, among other technical and soft skills. If you leverage outsourced product development or extended team service providers, they will have vetted these resources for you for all these of these required skills, to begin with.

Test them Using a Demo Project: Set up a few projects that you can assign your potential hires. These can be small projects that they can finish over the course of the interview itself, or over the course of a few days. This depends on the scale you’re looking at. This actually tests their skills in real-time. You can again reach out to outsourced product development or extended team service providers to set up this framework.

Be Transparent About the Flexibility You Can Offer: Many resources will assume independent flexibility when being offered a remote job. Make sure to communicate any critical turnaround times involved and what expectations you have from them regarding the turnaround time of their tasks.

Conduct Regular Meetings: Regular meetings are another wonderful technique to improve management with your remote product development team. This not only brings openness to the process but also ensures that everyone involved in the development process is on the same page. Ensure these meetings have a set agenda with tangible task tracking and are not ambiguous.

In our recommendation, remote product development is done best through a well established outsourced product development player like Pratiti who has been managing projects remotely for their clients successfully and have proven tools and practices to make the model work. If you have still not figured out how to get the best out of your remote resources, you are better off outsourcing your development to save costs, time and efforts. Listed above are some of the considerations to make before partnering with an outsourced and remote product development company. Checking all of these action items can assist you in not just finding the ideal partner, but also ensuring transparency while building a remote product development team. If you are looking to build a remote team, consider reaching out to a technology partner like Pratiti Technologies that can help you build this team from the ground up. Leveraging technology partner services can enable you to make the best out of the paradigm, as they have the expertise and framework required to help you succeed.

Nitin

Nitin Tappe

After successful stint in a corporate role, Nitin is back to what he enjoys most – conceptualizing new software solutions to solve business problems. Nitin is a postgraduate from IIT, Mumbai, India and in his 24 years of career, has played key roles in building a desktop as well as enterprise solutions right from idealization to launch which are adopted by many Fortune 500 companies. As a Founder member of Pratiti Technologies, he is committed to applying his management learning as well as the passion for building new solutions to realize your innovation with certainty.

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