Business Strategy

Why your internal team shouldn’t develop your new app

If you have a team of software developers, you know about the challenges of launching a new product while maintaining your existing software. Good engineers are hard to find and always in high demand. It’s a hard balance to keep them happy, maintain successful customer support processes, and take advantage of new opportunities.

Building new products can be a frustrating process for everyone involved. The developers are unhappy because you’re constantly introducing new support problems and new feature sets. Customers are unhappy because the software isn’t finished. It’s a challenge, and it isn’t getting easier.

After you’ve built a team and scaled a successful product in your vertical, you know that market and you know your customers. When you’ve won decisively in your vertical, so many opportunities open up to scale incrementally.

Here are three reasons your internal development team should not develop your new app:

1. Let your internal development team focus on the proven product

If you have a talented team of developers, they are invested in your product and its success. With developers in high demand, they have stuck with your team and your product for a reason. Let them continue improving your product. The more your customers use and love your product, the more valuable it becomes. No one is going to understand your product better than the team that created it.

If you switch all or part of your internal team to work on a new development, you risk several months of your main money-making product running with limited to no support. Letting a proven product fall behind or failing to quickly address new bugs in your company’s bread and butter product will drive customers away. Your internal team’s priority should be retaining existing customers and continuing to improve the product to attract new customers.

2. Think outside the box

An experienced external team will bring new strategies and ideas to expand your market reach. When a team of consultants, designers, and developers work together to build a product in a vertical you’ve already won, it’s an excellent way to expand your reach incrementally and develop new revenue streams. You provide the industry expertise to understand exactly what your target customers need and want, and a different industry expert understands how to leverage technology to deliver exactly what your audience wants.

Even in a small, agile product team, it’s easy for developers to develop a laser-focus on what they’ve always known about your product. In a bigger company, they might feel restricted by “we’ve always done it this way,” even if you say you’re open to innovation. Bringing in a new perspective from someone who hasn’t been working on your product for years and isn’t held to any unspoken expectations can often bring immense creativity into a product line that’s ready to expand.

3. Deliver new products faster

Timing is always an important factor with new software products. Businesses and consumers want the products they need when they need them. Creating a new product is a long, time-consuming process. Planning, design, development, testing, and launch can easily take six months with a team dedicated solely to that new product. If you have to switch the team back to the original product as it needs maintenance, you slow down the timeline on the new one, which in turn drags out the misery of trying to work on two products simultaneously.

If you’re relying on your team to maintain, improve, and support your existing product, planning and executing a new product isn’t going to be timely. You can create a new product engineering team, but it’s expensive to acquire and retain engineers. Even if you’re successful, the expense is very high.

At MotionMobs, we put a lot of energy into maintaining a certain culture that attracts top talent, and we encourage other software companies to do the same. Because we know the importance of releasing high quality software products in a timely manner, we focus specifically on developing new, custom products for companies of all sizes.

If you’re working on a new software product, we’d love to hear from you.

By Taylor Peake