The dedicated team model gives you developers who work full time on your product while being employed by a supplier. You set the priorities. The supplier handles hiring, people management and replacements. If you are weighing a Danish or nearshore partner against project-based outsourcing or freelancers, here is how it works in practice.
What to know
- You pay for capacity over time, not for a fixed deliverable.
- It suits a product that keeps evolving, where requirements change as you learn.
- You own the priorities. The supplier owns the staffing. Put that split in the contract.
- Expect a ramp-up period before the team reaches full pace.
- Measure delivered value and quality, not hours.
- Agree the exit before you start: code, access and documentation must be transferable.
When the dedicated team model beats the alternatives
The real choice is usually between three options. A fixed-price project fits when the scope can be written down in full and has a clear end date. Freelancers fit a bounded task that needs one specific skill for a short stretch. A dedicated team fits work that does not stop: a product with a roadmap, users giving feedback, and priorities that move from month to month.
Force ongoing product work into a fixed price and you get change requests and arguments. With freelancers, knowledge of your system lives with individuals who can leave at short notice. A stable team solves both.
What you control, and what the supplier controls
Buying a team does not remove the need to manage. Someone on your side has to own the product: decide what gets built, in what order, and when something is good enough.
- Your side: priorities, acceptance of work, access to the business and quick answers.
- The supplier’s side: recruitment, technical leadership, holiday and sickness cover, replacing people who do not fit.
- Shared: ways of working, coding standards, testing and deployment.
Write the split down. It is the agreement you both fall back on when something goes wrong.
Onboarding: the first weeks set the tone
A new team knows neither your code nor the rules nobody wrote down. Grant access to code, environments and tools on day one. Name one person to answer questions. Start with small, real tickets rather than a long induction.
If the team is inheriting an existing system, a code audit at the start pays for itself. It gives you and the team the same picture of risk before anyone builds on top.
How to tell whether it is working
Timesheets prove people were at work, not that you are getting value. Look at what ships.
- Delivery: how often does something reach production, and does anyone use it?
- Quality: how many bugs do users find, and how fast are they fixed?
- Predictability: does the team deliver roughly what it said it would in a given period?
- Stability: are these the same people you worked with six months ago?
Knowledge of your system lives in people’s heads. High turnover means paying for onboarding again and again.
Exit and taking over the code
The best time to agree the exit is before you start. The code lives in your repository, not the supplier’s. Your company owns the cloud accounts, domains and licences. Documentation and deployment setup are everyday work, not a final-month task.
Agree a handover period within the notice term, so an in-house team or a new supplier has time to learn the system. With that in place you are never locked in.
How we work
When you hire a dedicated development team from us, it works in your timezone, in your tools and to your priorities. If you only need individual profiles, you can hire developers one at a time, such as full-stack developers. Where the whole delivery moves out with a fixed scope, our software development outsourcing covers it, and a system in production can move to software maintenance.
Frequently asked questions
Start smaller than you think. Two or three developers with a clear product owner on your side often deliver more than a large team waiting for decisions.
Yes, and you should. Ask to meet the actual people before they start, and make sure they are the ones on the work afterwards. The supplier sources candidates and replaces anyone who does not work out.
You do, and the contract should say so. The code should sit in your repository from day one, so ownership never depends on a handover later.
The supplier finds a replacement and the rest of the team brings the new person up to speed. Agree up front how quickly a replacement must be in place.
What we would do
We would start with a product owner on your side, a small team and a defined first period of real work. Code and accounts sit with you from day one, and the exit terms are in the contract. After a couple of months you know whether pace and quality hold up.
Considering the dedicated team model for your product? Get in touch and we will look at whether it fits.
