You've got a groundbreaking idea, and the only thing between you and success is the creation of your product. Working with an Outsourced Team can streamline your journey from concept to reality. But what's the best way to initiate this collaboration, ensuring clarity and avoiding pitfalls?

In this article, we're exploring how to establish cooperation with your external development team. We'll look at two different kick-off points and the best frameworks to use while also establishing your founder's role in that process. Let's begin!

How to ensure success?

Innovation is driven by people - from ideation to execution. While human endeavors aren't flawless, as a founder, your involvement in the development process can be pivotal in realizing your vision with minimal time investment. You can easily integrate yourself into the development process enough to ensure you receive precisely what you need while dedicating as little time to achieve this.

There are two primary ways to start this cooperation:

1. When You Have a Problem to Solve: You see the potential for a hit product and have a strategy to captivate future users, but lack specific designs or marketing plans.
2. Knowing Exactly What You Need: Your product vision is clear, with nearly finalized designs and user pathways. What remains is for a skilled team to transform these plans into functional software.

We'll explore both scenarios to demonstrate how to maximize the benefits of working with an external team.

For a deeper dive into how starting a new venture with an outsourced team can be a game-changer, check out our detailed exploration: Is Starting a New Venture Possible with an Outsourced Team?

Starting with a problem to solve

In this case, as the founder, you have yet to have a specific resolution to an identified market gap. You see a potential for a great product, you have a hypothesis for a winning market formula, and you need a product to catch the hearts and minds of future users. However, you don't have any designs or funnels planned, just the core value proposition for the future product. This is where your external team comes in! They are there to know all the best UX trends, market trends, and usage patterns to weave with your requirements. Now, genuine cooperation begins through integration with an external team. This stage is extremely important, so you should learn how to transform integration chaos into harmony.

As a founder, you can choose your degree of involvement in cooperation, depending on your capabilities and how the external teams work. In the most engaging scenario, you take the so-called "Product Owner" role in the Agile Scrum framework. In this approach, you will create the product together piece by piece so that as time goes by, you can give shape to the product and, in a way, build the train as it is already riding the tracks. In the agile take of software development, you maximize value, and while it might take longer to complete, you will have more space to navigate the unknowns and verify different, smaller product hypotheses with the users. Thus, you avoid the risk of building the wrong product and pivoting/canceling the initiative while there is still a budget. For example, did you know Facebook started as a site meant to connect university students and changed into a popular social network based on users' behavior and demand?

While describing the Agile Scrum framework takes at least a small book, as a founder in this setup, you only need to know a few things:

• Your team will work in chunks of time called "sprints" that take anything from 1-4 weeks.
• Each sprint has a goal to achieve that you agree with the team at the beginning of the sprint during so-called "sprint planning."
• At the end of the sprint, the team reports on their progress, and you, as the founder/product owner, can accept the sprint content or not, depending on whether the goal was reached.

That means the more "hands-on" founders should dedicate around 3 hours for those two meetings each sprint, plus anything from an hour to a day to help the team plan the following sprints. Those "refinement" sessions will aim to plan and finalize any designs or other aspects of the development work where the founder's point of view is required. It's worth noting here that it's up to your software house partner to provide you with the right process and tools. After all, it's not really about only hiring a team but also making sure that the experience is smooth. The founder can focus on creating the right product with the team and leave all the other details to the contracted party.

Of course, for those of you with many businesses and responsibilities, nothing prevents you from using a proxy, either a person you know or a Product Owner provided by the software house, to free up even more time and still start your new venture. However, it's good to be there personally and guide the team towards a product that will achieve market success as you envisioned. As you will be working things out as you go along, the main stage for this approach is: