Which model to choose as a smart alternative to internal recruiting or project-based outsourcing? Which one is the best fit for startups and scale-ups with growing software development needs that have a long-term project but lack in-house expertise and require quick access to a talent pool? The answer is a dedicated team model, which enables VPs of Engineering, CTOs, and other technology decision-makers to fill gaps fast while managing costs.
This playbook is based on Belitsoft’s custom software development case studies. Belitsoft has 20+ years of tech experience across multiple domains verified by clients’ high scores on the most authoritative review platforms such as Gartner, G2, Goodfirms, and others. The agency offers several engagement models to ensure the best solution to specific software development needs, whether it is boosting your internal development capacity, bringing in specialized technical expertise, or speeding up the development process.
What Stands Behind Dedicated Development Team Model
It is an outsourcing model where a contractor creates a team that works with a customer on a long-term basis. The purpose is to compensate for lacking internal workforce and benefit from a global talent pool.
These professionals are exclusively assigned to the project. They smoothly integrate into the in-house department and operate like an extension of the in-company team.
At the same time, clients are able to hand-pick specialists by requirements, budget, timeframes, and project scope, while avoiding the efforts of the traditional hiring process. The dedicated team model is adjustable, enabling scale the team up or down if workload fluctuates.
This model is perfect for businesses who look for a strategic technology partner that delivers long-term software projects with evolving requirements. Such clients need quick response to market demand, and the dedicated team model speeds up time-to-market through a fully equipped team with exclusive focus from day one.
Comparison of Dedicated Team Model with Project-Based Outsourcing
A dedicated team, as a specific case of an extended team, remains on another firm’s payroll but works exclusively for a particular client. In fact, this team becomes part of a client’s in-house department and shares its daily workload.
Project-based or fixed-price outsourcing requires a well-established budget, scope, and timelines. The dedicated team approach enables partners to cope with changing priorities without the burden of renegotiating scope and price at every step, which is perfect for flexible roadmaps. Also, it is fruitful when the client has several concurrent projects straining in-company capacity and for organizations lacking the experience in tech project management.
The List of Typical Roles
- A business analyst transforms uncertain stakeholder ideas (“we kinda want X”) into verifiable requirements that become a reference point for the team.
- A project manager evaluates effort, tracks progress according to a schedule, controls deadlines, budget, and risks.
- A UX/UI designer projects user flows prototypes and visuals before writing any code, pinpointing usability concerns early so developers can pivot quickly.
- Developers create the software from verified specifications and vetted prototypes.
- QA engineers test the built solution against the requirements and report issues while they are cheapest to fix.
- DevOps keep the system stable in real time, automating deployments and monitoring.
Domains Where Dedicated Teams Stand Out
- Insurers, banks, and fintechs rely on this model for secure and solid solutions.
- Dedicated software engineers are a perfect fit to the ongoing SaaS development.
- Dedicated developers can create custom CRMs or thoroughly customize ready-made products to accelerate sales.
- Such teams are valuable for customizing ERP solutions.
- Healthcare providers hire dedicated developers to build or support EHRs, patient portals, telemedicine systems, and device software.
- Manufacturers partner with a dedicated team provider for IoT, smart-factory software, MES, and predictive-maintenance.
- Analytics-centric companies engage dedicated software engineers, data engineers, or BI developers to design ETL, data warehouses, and dashboards.
- Dedicated team providers offer both backend and front-end web development, as well as native (Android & iOS) and cross-platform mobile applications.
Tips for Managing Your Dedicated Team
Ensure true dedication
Negotiate with your vendor that your developers can’t be involved in other projects, and regularly track timesheets. Set meeting schedule: daily stand-ups, weekly reports, monthly strategy discussion. Common tools: Jira, MS Teams, Slack, Zoom, Trello, ClickUp, Confluence.
Stay involved
The executive stakeholder who approves strategy, budget and scope should drop into monthly reviews, and the client’s product owner should join daily meetings.
Be careful about documentation
Protect your knowledge in case of the situation when someone leaves the project. Keep documents up-to-date at the end of every sprint – onboarding instructions, decision logs, architecture diagrams.
Ensure strong remote process
Most of the dedicated teams are allocated in another time-zone. Picking a region without cultural gaps is one of the strategic decisions. The team should speak your language – both literally and culturally. Discuss and approve on which messaging tools to use, how quickly you expect a response, and what “done” means for you. Allocate at least four overlapping hours to stay in sync.
Processes that Decision-Makers Can Measure
Hiring small teams with well-defined roles is a good start, but it doesn’t lock in success by default. To keep performance visible and actionable, executives rely on four key operational dashboards:
- Delivery tracks only releases that successfully complete an approved objective or key result – it doesn’t get distracted by things like commit counts.
- Quality measures how many defects make it into production and how quickly the team fixes them. Ideally, both numbers should improve every quarter.
- Reliability looks at whether the team is hitting its published service-level objectives consistently and how fast they burn through their error budget. This metric is crucial because it highlights legal and brand risks.
- People Health blends quarterly pulse survey results with the rate of regretted departures to give a sense of team morale.
Each metric uses green, yellow, and red indicators. If any metric stays in the red for two sprints in a row, it’s the team’s responsibility to create a countermeasure plan, which the CTO reviews.
How to Hire a Dedicated Team Partner
When you engage a dedicated software development team vendor, you can manage the process following a predictable path that combines operational velocity and strong legal policies.
Recruitment & On-Boarding Plan
In this model of collaboration, you don’t think about talent acquisition, your vendor does. They research the market, create a short-list of candidates, and take responsibility for strict timelines.
Once you verify the list, the vendor is able to assemble the dedicated team in 2-6 weeks, depending on the required level of skills.
On-boarding process then switches the focus from quick recruiting to smooth integration when a new team is plugged into your product goals, security standards, and tool stack so they act like a natural extension of your in-company staff.
Legal & Agreement Backbone
Partnership is normally set up as a service agreement written in English. A thorough Service-Level Contract rides alongside the master agreement to lock in performance goals and response times.
In the contract, IP transfer must be spelled out. Poland’s EU membership ensures automatic compliance with GDPR, but credible vendors still layer security measures (NDAs, access controls) on top to protect your data.
How to Plan Budget for Hiring a Dedicated Team
Fully loaded cost per developer
Begin from a base salary. Add about 25% for benefits (taxes,pension, insurance) and an extra budget for the developer’s SaaS subscriptions, share of tools, and cloud resources. It gives a total cost per engineer for financial planning.
15% contingency
Create a budget buffer by allocating 15% to the total cost to cover variable cloud resources usage, license changes, and occasional vendor expenses.
From head count to all-in project cost
To get a full picture, multiply the fully loaded (plus contingency) cost by the number of developers. Then, multiply that figure by the burndown rate (the proportion of scoped work done per sprint) from the work breakdown structure. The result provides you with a total cost of ownership for the software engineering program, before development starts.
Managing budgeting issues and technical debt
Dedicate roughly 20% of each sprint to handle technical debt and follow two simple limits for codebase to stay healthy.
Monitor the average age of unresolved critical issues. If this figure exceeds 30 days, take a break with adding new functionality until the backlog is cleared below this mark.
In parallel, track each service’s error budget. When a service exhausts allocated budget, shift the team’s focus from functionality delivery to tasks that ensure stability until the budget level is restored. It prevents debt from getting piled up.
Measuring Return on Engineering Investment
Keep an eye on revenue generated per engineer each quarter and compare it to the industry median. If you notice a drop, concentrate on three points:
- Feature mix: Are the teams building things customers don’t really value?
- Process efficiency: Have lead time or cycle time risen lately?
- Tooling costs: Is excessive cloud usage eating into your margins unnecessarily?
Using dashboards that track throughput, quality, reliability, and team engagement can help pinpoint the issue quickly.
Navigating economic ups and downs
Maintain a simple three-level backlog to stay flexible without losing sight of priorities:
- Essential work protects current revenue and ensures compliance – this always stays on.
- Growth work propels future revenue and can accelerate or slow down depending on market conditions.
- Optional work is experimental and the first to be paused when budgets tighten.
The same guide works for headcount: exploratory departments can be reduced or redeployed before growth teams, and growth teams before the core workforce that ensure the organization’s license to operate. Once the moment revenue or liquidity drops below target, the protocol fires automatically – contractor negotiations begin and hiring process pauses within 24 hours. This tiered playbook connects day-to-day operations to financial reality and lets leadership concentrate target resources where they bring the most value.
The Level of Dedicated Teams in Poland
Nowadays, Poland is in the top of global developer rankings, because of a combination of deep expertise, strong work culture, communication skills, and fast growing European economics.
Poland sits at the 2nd position in CEE – and at the 13th around the globe – for English proficiency.
Coursera lists this country in the 1st place in Central & Eastern Europe and in the 4th one worldwide for data-science expertise. HackerRank and TopCoder ranks Poland among the TOP-3 coding nations.
Beneath this recognition lies a versatile technology stack – .NET/C#, Python, AI/ML, Java, PHP, JavaScript, TypeScript, C++, SQL, mobile, cloud, fintech, cyber-security, game development, and blockchain – supported by a culture that endorses continuous learning.
In spite of recent rapid salary growth, partnering with dedicated teams in Poland still saves companies 30-60% in comparison with filling this gap in the USA and Western Europe.
About the Author:
Dmitry Baraishuk is a partner and Chief Innovation Officer at a software development company Belitsoft (a Noventiq company). He has been leading a department specializing in custom software development for 20 years. The department has hundreds of successful projects in AI software development, healthcare and finance IT consulting, application modernization, cloud migration, data analytics implementation, and more for startups and enterprises in the US, UK, and Canada.
