Every great company and startup usually starts with a single idea or a market need. However, translating this idea into a usable product is where the real work begins.
To bring an idea to life, you need a team capable of creating and taking the product to market quickly. If you choose to grow an internal team, you may spend too much time and money. Instead, consider leveraging IT staff augmentation to scale your team seamlessly.
IT staff augmentation is the best solution to scale teams and swiftly gain the needed expertise without investing in full-time employees.
This article explains IT staff augmentation as a crucial tool for MVP development. By the end, you’ll understand how to tap the right talent, from the right people, and at the right cost.
What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?
An MVP (minimum viable product) is a test version of a product that includes only the essential features that meet the needs of early adopters or clients.
An MVP’s main objective is to expose an idea, a concept, or new software functionality in a real market with the minimum investment possible. This process allows you to get into the market quick, gather user feedback and validate assumptions before jumping to full scale development.
5 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Building an MVP
Here are seven common mistakes to avoid for an effective, better-positioned, and successful MVP launch:
1. Poor Market Research Before Development
Building an MVP before conducting any serious market research is a mistake. If you don’t understand your audience, their pain points, and currently available solutions, you may end up building something no one wants. Also, you might create a solution that doesn’t provide any unique value compared with other existing solutions.
So, before building anything, do your research. Send out surveys, conduct interviews, and run focus groups with your target audience. Knowing your audience will tell you what features will be important enough to make customers buy from you instead of your competition.
2. Choosing the Wrong Technology Stack
Choosing the wrong technology stack will result in problems with future scalability, cost, or development timeframes. Technologies should align with your product needs, long-term planning, and your development team’s expertise.
If you don’t have the necessary expertise to use a critical technology, you can consult with experts like Zartis for advice and assistance. Your development team should be involved in these decisions.
3. Skipping the Prototyping Phase
Building a prototype is a key step in developing an MVP, yet many teams skip it to save time. Prototyping allows you to generate more visual ideas for your product. It also allows you to test some assumptions and gather early feedback from customers.
You can test the design and user experience through a prototype at a low cost. If you skip this stage, you will likely end up solving the wrong problems. And when you realize it later, it will be more costly to resolve. A wireframe or mockup can be a useful tool for this phase.
4. Poor Communication with the Development Team
Poor communication between the product and development teams is another reason why MVPs fail. If you’re unclear about what you want, your team will struggle with understanding what you need. And if you all aren’t on the same page, you will get different results.
To solve this issue, create a framework for communication early on. Use project management tools for tracking progress, schedule meetings to discuss updates and challenges, encourage team members to ask for help, and ensure you show up to support and encourage them.
5. Underestimating Time and Budget Requirements
Teams frequently underestimate the time it takes to develop an MVP, leading to early launches and botched products. To avoid launching too early, draw a realistic project roadmap and estimate the total time to complete each milestone. Reserve some buffer in the timeline for some unexpected risks and delivery delays.
Next, define your project budget. Make sure to account for every penny to be spent for the development, marketing, user acquisition, and some emergency buffer. Using this approach will help you anticipate unplanned expenses that might thwart your project before it begins.
What is IT Staff Augmentation?
IT staff augmentation is a flexible outsourcing strategy that helps businesses hire external IT talent to work alongside their current employees, filling skill gaps and providing extra resources to finish projects.
Companies that struggle to scale their workforce quickly and do not want to hire full-time employees can lean on IT staff augmentation. It provides flexibility to hire different IT professionals, such as software developers, network engineers, data analysts, or cyber security experts – without compromising on quality or control. IT staff augmentation could be your gateway to successful MVP development.
Why Use IT Staff Augmentation to Build an MVP?
IT staff augmentation is desirable in MVP projects for the following reasons:
1. Access to Top Talent
Developing an MVP typically requires thorough knowledge of software development, UI/UX design, and testing. Recruiting full-time employees with the exact skill sets can be time- and money-consuming.
Research has shown that 87 percent of companies experience a tech talent shortage or will face this problem in the upcoming years. However, with IT staff augmentation, a company can quickly gain access to a pool of carefully vetted professionals possessing exactly the skills needed for the project at hand.
Instead of spending months and shelling out vast amounts of money on hiring the right people, you can find an already-seasoned developer, designer, or engineer ready to contribute their expertise from day one.
2. Faster Time-to-Market
IT staff augmentation allows your business to scale up your teams fast without waiting for the recruitment of full-time employees. You can choose an augmented IT professional as an on-demand member or contractor and have them start working on your projects immediately.
Most companies prefer onboarding augmented specialists who are already senior professionals and know the ropes. It means that the new member of your team will need less time to get familiar with your product. The time spent on coding, testing, and iteration will be much shorter, and the time-to-market of the MVP can be expedited.
3. Cost-effective Resource Allocation
Working with full-time employees can be excessively costly when it comes to short-term projects like MVPs. But thanks to staff augmentation, you can access professionals with the necessary qualifications only when you need them. You do not have to pay full-time staff wages for months when there are no tasks to handle, allowing you to use resources effectively.
The other major benefit of staff augmentation is that overhead costs – expenses on recruitment, onboarding, and employee benefits – are dramatically reduced. With staff augmented by external specialists, you avoid having to muster a large internal workforce.
4. Flexibility and Scalability
A successful MVP may continue to evolve over time, as new requirements arise or scope shifts. IT staff augmentation lets you add and subtract your IT staff as projects require. For example, you can bring in augmented staff to add more developers during a coding sprint, or to incorporate more designers during a design update.
This scalability means you’ll always have the right number of professionals working on your project, shrinking or growing your workforce size according to the project phase or urgency. You’ll never risk overstaffing or understaffing your project.
5. Reduced Hiring Risks
One of the risks associated with recruiting permanent employees for your MVP project is that if the product is unsuccessful or the scope changes, you could end up burdened with staff for whom you need to find other roles. Since staff augmentation lets you bring in professionals on a short-term basis, if the project ends or pivots later down the line, you won’t need to proceed with layoffs or figure out how to manage your redundancies.
Also, with IT staff augmentation you don’t have to hire professionals before you evaluate how they perform. As soon as you see that the new team member is not a good fit for your team culture or workflow, you can replace them without any long-term commitments.
IT Staff Augmentation Examples
Here are some examples of IT staff augmentaiton projects that we delivered for our clients at Zartis:
Fexco Case Study on Nearshore IT staff augmentation:
Discover how we have been helping Ireland’s Fintech solutions giant modernise its tech stack, replace legacy software, and develop a cutting-edge digital signature product. Our augmented engineers have been working with the Fexco team on a daily basis since 6+ years and counting.
Kaluza Case Study on Nearshore IT staff augmentation:
Find out how our software engineers are contributing daily to product development with multiple technologies, including Go, React, Node.js and TypeScript, to support Kaluza’s in-house team with new tech skills.
Why Augment Your IT Team With Zartis
If you’re looking for top talent to help with your MVP project, Zartis has got you covered with advice, tips, and recommendations to build an augmented product development team.
We can help you scale your IT team, helping you find the right combination of experts you need for your unique project.
Zartis can also assist with the administrative aspects of an MVP project, giving you the confidence to focus on your task. Contact us today and scale your team quickly.
