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How Tech and IT Managers Can Help Make Great Startups 🚀

PerceptionBox — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 13:44:48 +0000

How Tech and IT Managers Can Help Make Great Startups

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Startups come in many different sizes and flavors. When talking Tech and IT managers, we can include the Chief Technical Officer, Project Manager, Software Engineering Manager, or Team Leader. Sometimes, it can even be the Tech Guru - the gal or guy in a non-tech company who happens to be savvier than everyone else when it comes to tech. If you are in or aspiring to be in any of these roles, you can have a profound impact on the success of your startup - and even more mature companies. Not all of these tips will apply in every instance, but here are twelve tips you can apply to drive your startup to greatness.

Tip 1. Company priorities and financial situation

Anyone from engineering manager and up will likely be involved in a startup’s planning at the earliest stages - and forever after. Startups can be crazy, requiring a lot of focus on what’s happening today, this week, and this month. At the same time, it’s important to be thinking about next quarter and the year ahead. This is vital with respect to several points:

How long is your current funding runway?
When do you expect to a) go after, and b) actually get, your next round of funding?
What do you need to deliver in order to make that funding happen?
What IT and developer resources do you need to deliver that on-time and on-budget?
If you win the next round of funding, how are you going to scale up development?
Of your existing development team, who is a good candidate for promotion - and what skills would be desirable for them to pick up before you start scaling up?

Yeah, now that’s a load. As often said, “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

Know your options, the cost, the opportunity-cost or trade-offs, and how long each component will take to put into place. Thinking through these things in advance and having contingencies allows you to adjust to changes faster and more effectively for a far smoother trajectory.

Tip 2. Define standards early and enforce them

This tip probably falls to the software engineering manager, but it’s also something that can be delegated to another engineer or developer. Even as you’re in the process of hiring a team, begin setting the coding standards you expect them to follow. This may take the form of style guides, commenting rules, details in adding, assigning, and completing tasks in your project management software. It extends to defining what’s “good enough” code by your standard to offset the negative aspects of ‘perfectionism’ (high code churn and late deliverables).

More time will be spent reading than writing code. The software project is likely to cycle through several entire teams before it’s laid to rest, setting the foundation as the first engineering manager will help everyone across its life read it faster, understand it better, and find bugs more easily. Spaghetti code’s in rapid decline, but it’s worthy of extinction. Use code reviews to reinforce style guides and other standards. These efforts can save your startup $100k’s over the years.

Tip 3. Hiring and onboarding

Assembling the right team with all of the skills your software will need is paramount. Software development is expensive, so you have important decisions to make in choosing to hire employees, outsourcing to developers through an IT staffing agency, or outsourcing to a software development agency to handle everything.

The best option is the one that fits best with your startup across many variables. Are you planning to return to an office format if/when things return to normal? Perhaps, you want a certain social, cultural, and ideological alignment? Or maybe, you more concerned with things like cost vs. developer productivity, code quality, and dependability? There are a lot of other angles to consider, but you need to consider what’s important - not just to your founding principles, but to your prospective investors.

But, in addition to hiring, you also have to think about retention and turnover. Turnover among developers averages about 12.3% but can easily exceed 25% for tech startups. There are a few reasons for this, like:

Not having a Human Resources Manager, Team, or Program.
An inexperienced hiring manager/authority and not vetting candidates.
A lack of structure, clearly defined processes, and general chaos.
Poor alignment of personal and company values.
Better job offers and/or lack of skill development opportunities.

As many startups don’t have a dedicated HR manager, it’s likely going to be a shared duty - and for that reason, you need a consistent standard for “employee issues.” Anything will work better than nothing, so just customizing this free employee handbook for your startup will help buy some time. Even that’s more than what most startups have.

Two things can be said for IT staffing agencies in general. They specialize in recruiting, vetting, team-wide skill matching, and providing essential HR support to the developers they recommend to you. They are also responsible for managing turnover among their developers. In every other respect, augmented teams are extensions of - part of - your team.

Hiring developers is always a 1-to-1 proposition. Actually, with the entire onboarding process, it’s a many-to-1 proposition. Finding an IT staffing agency you can trust is a 1-to-many proposition. You’ll still be able to screen and interview each prospective candidate, but you’ll save 80% or more of the time associated with hiring each developer directly.

Tip 4. Get to know your team and make them feel appreciated

It’s not difficult to cultivate a closely-knit team, especially with startups. It doesn’t happen overnight, but there are a few things that you can do to hasten it. This starts with getting to know everyone in your startup on a first-name basis. Greet them in the morning, wish them a good night in the evening and thank them for their work. This goes for all team members, employees, freelancers, outsourced developers. Then, do your best to introduce them to everyone else.

To assist in this, it can be helpful to showcase all team-members in a section of your Employee Handbook. Share their name, what they do (job), picture, and let them add a short note or two (favorite quote, pet peeve, bit of background), and link to their LinkedIn profile.

There’s a lot more ground to cover, so we’ll keep this one short and cover it in more depth in our next blog post.

Tip 5. Be available for your team

Not the easiest thing to do, but valuable to cultivate for all social interactions. The first step here is simply making your team aware that you have an “open door” policy. If they need to talk, about “anything” - that you are there for them. Obviously, they may need to wait if you are already talking with someone, in a meeting, or engaged. Also, “anything” can be far-ranging, suffice that it’s probably about their work, job, conditions, or intervening situations impacting their work.

Answer the things that you can that are related to their job and work, but for everything else, you really just need to listen and point them in the direction of appropriate assistance. The main thing here is to give them your full, undivided attention. Move everything aside, keep eye contact, acknowledge what they are saying. Ask questions to clarify. They may just need to rant, vent, or talk through their problem. Where appropriate, instead of providing a direct answer to their problem, ask questions to help guide them to that answer. Admittedly, this is vague and broad in nature, but sometimes people just need to talk.

Tip 6. Honesty and transparency

Trust is a critical part of any team. It can be difficult as a manager because you are the critical connection between your company and your team. Sometimes their interests and priorities can be very different. Without the company, your team will be without jobs. Without your team, your company will probably lose clients. Your role to look out for the interests of both. The only way to do this without causing more problems to be honest with everyone without casting a bad light on anyone else.

Few occasions make this more difficult than when a company’s executives make “unpopular” decisions. It should also be said that it is also management’s role to provide their executives with objective data to drive sound decisions. It may warrant an extra diplomatic effort to offer better alternative options. At the end of the day, the manager must support the company and implement executive decisions to the best of their ability. The best case is to try to understand the full picture driving the decision. Discuss with your team to find the best pathway to success. Complaining about it or getting negative helps no one.

Tip 7. Delegate

We can keep this one simple. Your role is complex and at times you may feel overwhelmed. If you feel overwhelmed all of the time, there’s a good chance that you’re trying to micromanage too much. Many Agile Teams are capable of self-managing or are otherwise highly decentralized. Code reviews, retrospectives, standups, and other work processes make it so you don’t always have to be checking in on them.

If your plate is too full - prioritize what needs to be on it. Look at the task and consider which of your team members might enjoy it or benefit from it (i.e.training), and see if they can spare some time for it. If you have a task that you hate and no one else wants to do it either, outsource it if you can. Failing that, find a way to make it fun or incentivize it so that someone might actually want to do it just for the perks.

Tip 8. Promote career and skill development

Early on, you may have very limited resources to support a career development or continuing education program for your developers. However, you still have a lot of tools at your disposal - code reviews, daily standups, retrospectives, and mentoring, for starters. There are a lot of programming languages so you might pair a developer strong in C# with little time in Java with another developer strong in Java but still learning C#. Include a “coding tip of the day” at the end of each standup.

The other thing you can do is point your developers to free and low-cost online courses, like the Open Education Consortium, MIT Open Courseware, EdX, Udemy, or other sites. For the long-term, you might incorporate some of the free “courses” into your own company training programs - starting out small but adding and refining as you go. If there are skills you know your team is going to need later, get them started. You might incentivize participation by sharing the cost or allow some training or study on the clock.

Tip 9. Experiment and automate

Always be open to finding new ways to *improve the quality of your work” while also making it easier, faster, and less expensive. This requires knowing the baselines for anything you’re trying to improve. You also want to examine how much effort any change will require to assess the ROI for the change. Welcome suggestions from your team members. You can also delegate a product/service review or analysis to one of your team members.

Before implementing a change, have other team members try it out to see if they like it. If a change maintains or increases work or output quality, people like to use it, and it’ll clearly save money in the short-mid term, it’s worth it. Try to always have one project under evaluation on a “time as available” basis.

Tip 10. Technical support for other departments

It’s tempting to place this a lot higher on the list. But, if you spend just 15 minutes a week interacting with other departments you’re doing more than most other tech managers. A little bit of your time can go a long way.

If you see important technical news about your industry or competition, share it with your executives. Take a moment to explain the ramifications, if necessary.
With sales and marketing, let their manager feel welcome to approach you for technical explanations and wording in brochures, PowerPoint presentations, etc. All the right words in the wrong order can kill a lead.
Invite your company’s blogger to ask you technical questions or co-write articles for you or your team members. See what they’re writing about next and come up with a quote or two for them to use.
Check-in with operations and let them know you’re happy to assist them with any tech-related issues. You can answer questions, inform them of automation options, point them in the right direction. They’ll be responsible for implementation, but time available, your team might be able to provide assistance.

Thing is - a specialist can sometimes do in 15 minutes or an hour what could take a generalist all day. A generalist might know there are solutions available to make their jobs easier, i.e. to automate certain tasks, but lack the technical know-how to do it. This point is simply asking you to be a good neighbor.

An extra tip - get some sleep!

Far easier said than done, but “Do It!” You’re going to have tough decisions to make. The higher up you are on the corporate ladder, typically the fewer decisions you will have to make - but their importance carries far greater weight. At some point, too, you really want to transition from thinking about “today” and plan more for the future.

Startup Snapshot Surveys – Covid’s 2020 Impact on Israeli Startups

PerceptionBox — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 07:37:05 +0000

COVID’s impact on Israel startup finances

The first survey, published in May of 2020, was conducted by Y. Benjamin Strategic Marketing, LeumiTech, Samsung Next, and the law firm Herzog Fox & Neeman. Over 400 Israeli startups participated in it. It covers the impact on issues of hiring, compensation, selling of shares, fundraising, and detailed startup statistics. They can be roughly characterized as being VC funded (61%), having raised less than $10 million, and having fewer than 40 employees. You can register for a free copy of their survey at startup-snapshot.com.

Some key points:

A full 50% were looking near-term (4 months) to raise bridge funding.
Running out of funds was the #1 reason for seeking bridge funding.
71% froze hiring, fired, or furloughed employees.
Over 60% planned to reduce wages but increase equity and compensation options.
57% saw this situation as an opportunity to restructure their teams.

Overall, most say that it’s taking longer to secure funding while also getting somewhat less funding. Nevertheless, 2020 was a record-breaking year for Israel bringing in over $10 billion in investments owing in large part to startups’ rapid and agile response to the crisis.

COVID’s impact on the office

The second survey, published in November of 2020, was also spearheaded by Y. Benjamin Strategic Marketing in conjunction with Leumitech, Intel Ignite, and Yigal Arnon Law, in partnership with the Zell Entrepreneurship Program and Benson Oak Ventures. Over 200 startups participated in this more in-depth survey on matters of their workforce, sales, product, fundraising, and interaction with accelerators. You can download it here.

Prior to Covid, perhaps 5% of Israeli employees were allowed to telecommute. That’s effectively flipped, with 87% now telecommuting on at least a part-time basis, with 42% doing so full-time.

44% of startups either reduced their office space.
Half of the startups see employee location as less important than before.
29% indicate they will rely more upon outsourcing.
Productivity has remained the same (47%) with a 27 to 26% ratio of gainers vs. losers.
‘An overwhelming 85% see it at least somewhat likely that they’ll maintain their WFH stance for at least a year after the Covid crisis ends.

Prior to the lockdowns, Israel lacked at least 15,000 IT personnel to meet demand. While layoffs may temporarily ease access to local talent, Israeli companies increasingly have to compete with their larger international counterparts driving up wages. That’s not likely to change if and when we start returning to normal.

Get a world-class developers with no stress

We build and scale software teams and R&D centres. Flexible staffing, full-time staffing, and R&D centres in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Extending the startup funding runway by outsourcing

When it comes to software development, location is far less of an issue than experience, technical skill, and actual compensation expenses. The technical skills of Ukrainian software developers rank 5th globally while offering the 2nd greatest value proposition.

Though some companies have outright laid their software development teams off, no one would suggest for you to take that dramatic of a shift with your team. Well, if you’re going out of business or have canceled your software project – you may not have a choice. Many startups are restructuring their teams – gradually transitioning to more outsourcing and/or planning for growth to coincide with the Series A-B-C funding rounds.

Take a look at your funding runway and consider adjustments that you may need to start making now. If your funds dry up, you may have to rely upon bridge funding to help you reach your next funding stage. At that point, there’s only so much you can do to mitigate your expenses while simultaneously proving to investors that you have a team that will get you to your destination. Explore what outsourcing can do for your startup so that if and when you do need to make some adjustments you know what to expect and how outsourcing can benefit your startup.

Startup Founder Tips for Conventions – Real & Virtual

PerceptionBox — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 07:03:37 +0000

Five Reasons to go to conferences

This focuses on attending conferences, not setting up exhibits. Running an exhibit at a conference is more expensive and requires more resources to support. An exhibit could be useful for you, but let’s make that a separate discussion. There are a lot of reasons to simply attend tech conferences, summits, and tradeshows, including:

Find prospective investors and customers
Make connections and share experiences
Learn from industry experts and get inspired
Get some free press
Observe and learn the ropes for future events

Research the venue, vendors and sponsors

Ideally, define the events you want to attend 2-3 months (or more) in advance so you have ample time to prepare. Make sure the event will be useful for you. As the founder or partner in a startup, your time is valuable. If the event fits your niche, very few things could be more valuable than attending it with a plan to get the most from it.

How large is the venue?
What kind of reviews did it receive in previous years?
How much do the tickets cost?
Are its vendors and sponsors closely aligned to your target market?

If you decide the convention or match is a good fit for your startup, identify specific companies you want to meet with – then, identify who will be representing them. This may take some research on LinkedIn and/or social channels. You can also write the company directly if all else fails and try to arrange a meeting with their representative, in advance.

What are your goals?

As a startup, you probably have a lengthy shopping list of things that could be useful for you. Make that shopping list – and prioritize the items on it. Be realistic with your expectations. Merely attending a conference won’t bring you investors, but it may get you a foot in the door. Some objectives might be:

Enter any startup pitch competitions or contests for which you feel you can be prepared.
Meet and talk with representatives from angel and venture capital firms to see if there’s a match between your startup and what they invest in.
Connect with prospective clients and customers who may be interested in what your startup aims to offer. Find out what software they’re using now, how happy they are with it, features they’d like to see, etc.
Connect with groups and organizations that represent your industry. See if they have an events calendar of their own. This can range from programmer groups to professional associations or lobbyist groups on the high-end.
Talk with vendors you will need in the future like providers of cloud or hosting services, advertising agencies, distributors, and retailers, as appropriate to lay the foundation for future deals.
See how others have handled obstacles and problems that you’re still trying to resolve.
Try to get some free publicity with journalists or influencers that you follow regularly.

Define in advance what you can offer on the spot

Most importantly is knowing what you are able to offer based upon where you are at in development. Know what kind of deals you can make and be ready to offer them on the spot. This can range from promoting a free webinar to explain your project after the conference to early access or a free trial. Of course, promote sales or subscriptions if you’re ready to provide at least basic customer support.

If funding is your primary objective, be able to concisely how much you need and what you need it for should someone ask. You don’t want to waste their time or yours, suffice that most investors know and expect that the details are more complex. Your answer will tell them whether they should take further interest in your startup or not.

Your startup may need other things – so know your budget and be ready to wheel and deal, because that’s what all of the vendors are there to do, too.

Also, if you have questions, write them out in advance. You’ll have direct access to industry experts and they’ll be happy to answer most questions for free.

Bring Promotional materials

Whether you’re attending physical events or virtual ones, you’ll want promotional materials. In the physical, you’ll want plenty of nice business cards at the very least. From there, you may step it up with a promotional brochure, cool (but cheap) swag like a pen with your logo, tagline, and website URL. It can also be a good idea to carry at least a few press kits with you. If you’re doing virtual conventions, you can use PDF versions of the same.

Practice and memorize your elevator pitch so that it sounds natural. This can be based, at least in part, upon your product vision statement. It’s useful to have a short but memorable 15-second version that segues into a longer version according to listener interest.

The more you network, the easier it is to network more

Buddy-up! It can be awkward trying to socialize alone. Ideally, bring others from your startup with you to make as many contacts as you can. Alternatively, if you have friends or colleagues in other startups see if they’d like to tag-team the event. Share your goals and keep each other informed of opportunities throughout the conference.

The real goal is to create opportunities for introductions. Each and every introduction you make has a chance to lead to more introductions. Or to put it another way, “The more you network, the easier it gets to network more.” Qualified introductions, where one party is in the market for what the second party is offering are always best. Networking, where one party is in the market for something the second party knows someone else is able to offer also works.

Keep an eye open for journalists

As noted in promotional materials, it’s always a good idea to have press kits onhand and available to handout. Tech and business journalists, television and magazine reporters, attend conventions, too. They might make videos or write articles, suffice that they’re constantly on the look for an interesting story, new technologies, cool quotes, and industry insight.

A press kit makes it easy for journalists to write a story about your startup. If one journalist picks up your story, you dramatically increase your chances of getting picked up by others. It’s also “news” that you can publish on your website, press kit, or blog.

Get a world-class developers with no stress

We build and scale software teams and R&D centres. Flexible staffing, full-time staffing, and R&D centres in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Take notes on the vendor exhibits

If you have reason to think that your startup will want its own exhibit in the vendor area, take stock of the most impressive setups. What’s the first thing you noticed about them? Where were they located on the floorplan. What was the foot traffic like and what portion of people paused to at least look at what they were offering? How many people do they have? Are they dressed in suits, casual, wearing company t-shirts or other branded attire? What do they have in the way of promotional brochures or swag? What devices are they using? Were they using videos?

Follow-up with the people you met

After the convention, make sure to follow-up with the people you met if you managed to get their contact info. This can be a quick letter thanking them for their time and the information they shared. Then see if they’d like to schedule a short chat on Zoom, Skype, or whatever’s convenient for them. Try to have a couple of questions at the intersection of what they do and what you do. This may require some thought, but odds are if they’re in tech, they’ve interacted with other startups.

Of course, your discussion could immediately jump into the details of your startup or finalizing a deal that you already discussed. That’s likely to be with a minority of your contacts – but you never know when other contacts you made can be useful. If you had a meaningful conversation and they were friendly, take that as a win and try to touch base with them every so often. If your contacts seemed particularly keen on social media – like, share, retweet them on those channels, too.

Again, the more you network – the easier it is to network more. We might have to discuss that in a lot more depth one of these days!

There are a lot of other things you can do to get the most out of the conferences and summits you attend – here are thirty conference tips to help you cover everything down to the hand sanitizer.

Understanding Israel’s Tech Partnership with Ukraine

PerceptionBox — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 06:49:47 +0000

The Ukrainian Israeli Innovation Summit

For the past three years (2018-2020), Israeli and Ukrainian tech companies have met in Ukraine to develop relations between their two countries. These three summits were launched and organized by the Global Israeli Initiatives platform. Summit participants from both countries have included government representatives. investors, startups, and business leaders from the Medtech, FinTech, Cybersecurity, Smart Energy, Smart City, and other tech markets. All in all, more than 200 Israeli tech companies have participated in the summit leading to scores of business deals including over US $150 million of IT outsourcing services.

Presently, plans for a 2021 Summit have not been announced. We will update this article if and when they are. The UIISummit website showcases dozens of sponsors and participants that you can reach out to talk about their experience in IT outsourcing with Ukrainian developers. It is by far the largest event of its kind, representing companies with over $35 billion in total capitalization.

Sharing a strong cultural and language background

Following Ukraine’s separation from the Soviet Union, over 250 thousand Jews emigrated to Israel during the 1990s. They represented about 5% of Israel’s total population of ~5 million at the time. According to the European Jewish Congress, about 400,000 Jews still live in Ukraine.
Emigration continues, though at lower levels. Many families and friends still keep in contact with each other. In a traditionally tight-knit community, it’s natural to work together, too.

While Ukraine has since moved to Ukrainian as its official language, most still speak or at least easily understand Russian. Presently, with a population of about 9 million, around 1.5 million or 17% of Israeli’s speak Russian. As English is the closest thing to a “universal programming language” - and roughly 7 out of 8 Israeli’s have a high level of English fluency. Ukrainian developers are not far behind on this score, with ~45% having high-intermediate to advanced levels of fluency in English, while another third have at least intermediate proficiency.

Software’s complex and project requirements involve detailed specifications, but you can be assured your Ukrainian developers will understand precisely what you need. A simple point of fact is that developers who are not satisfactorily proficient in English are typically limited to working with local companies. Language proficiencies are an integral part of the skill matching and vetting conducted by any IT outsourcing agency.

Same time zone and convenient flights

It’s always nice to work in the same time zone. Israel and Ukraine both reside in GMT+2. Many countries aren’t so lucky with their outsourcing prospects. Travel between Israel and Ukraine is easy, too. Non-stop affordable Flights between Tel Aviv, Israel and Kyiv, Ukraine are available Sunday-Thursday. Flight time is around 3.25 hours. Non-stop or 1-stop flights are also available to Dnipro, Kharkiv, Kherson, Lviv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, and Zaporizhia.

Also, short-term (less than 90 day) visits to Ukraine by Israeli citizens don’t require a visa, as per the Embassy of Ukraine in the State of Israel website:

“According to the Agreement between the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and the Government of the State of Israel on the waiver of visa requirements for holders of national and service passports of Ukraine and of the State of Israel nationals of the state of one party holding valid national or service passports may enter, leave, pass in transit or stay in the territory of the state of the other party without obtaining a visa for 90 days per period of 180 days.”

Matching economic interests

As the #StartupNation, Israel’s need for quality IT specialists eclipses the number of new workers entering the field each year. Conversely, Ukraine is heavily focused on developing its IT services sector. If interested, check out the Export Strategy for Information Technologies Sector 2019-2023 by the Ministry for Development of Economy, Trade and Agriculture of Ukraine. As it points out, “Over the past 10 years, IT exports increased significantly, growing on average by 20.7% annually.” That owes heavily to Ukraine’s growing reputation for exceptional quality and value in IT outsourcing.

Israel must engage internationally as its population, at around 9 million, doesn’t offer sufficient economy of scale to focus on local product development. Ukraine must also engage internationally with services as its economy presents limitations of another sort. This can be attributed to GDP per capita or Purchasing Power Parity as compared in the following table:

GDP per Capita by International Dollar Per IMF 2020 estimates:

Presuming all else is equal, a Ukrainian company needs 3 local customers to generate the same revenue as 1 Israeli customer; or 5 to match 1 customer in the USA.

While wages of Ukrainian IT specialists and software developers are steadily increasing, they are still up to 40% lower than wages in Israel, and 60-75% lower than in the United States, depending on location. At the same time, Ukrainian developers are among the top wage earners in Ukraine owing to growing global demand. This, in turn, is fueling a steady growth in the number of new developers and IT specialists entering Ukraine’s workforce each year.

Israel vs Ukraine wage comparison

For each in-house software developer you hire in Tel Aviv or in Israel (generally), you could have two highly skilled Ukrainian developers on your team. According to SkillValue, Ukrainian developers rank #5 globally in technical proficiency, scoring almost 14% better than their Israeli counterparts.

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reports that the average wage for Information and Communications jobs is NIS 22,418 or about US $6,590 per month ($79k per year). Fully-loaded costs can be much higher - with some companies offering fringe benefits such as premium health plans, gym memberships, stock options, free daycare services, etc. Comparatively, outsourcing with Ukrainian developers will run an average of around $50k annually.

Maybe you’d like to talk about your IT staffing requirements and how we can help you extend your team with Ukrainian software developers? Call us toll-free at 1-800-PERCEPTIONBOX or please use the form below. Also, you can get a no-obligation quote using our Team Cost Calculator. Tell us what you need and we’ll get back to you asap with the current going rates.

How to Transition to an Outsourced Team

PerceptionBox — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 11:16:10 +0000

Original post - https://perceptionbox.io/business/how-to-transition-to-an-outsourced-team/

Choosing an IT staffing agency

What if you don’t know your software requirements?
What does a typical software development team look like?
Outsourcing for early-stage startups
The IT outsourcing transition for SMB’s
Make room for new projects
Outsourcing to streamline costs
Outsourcing to expand your business
An R&D center and staff augmentation
9 mins read

Choosing an IT staffing agency

In all cases where you want to outsource your IT Staffing, it’s necessary to do some research. Selecting a staffing agency is tantamount to selecting a business partner, not a typical vendor. You have a vested interest to know they have a reliable track record and can provide you with the highly qualified IT specialists and software developers that your project needs.

Choosing an IT Staffing Agency in Six Easy Steps defines the selection process in detail, covering how to:

Create your Software Requirement Specification (SRS)
Define other requirements
Create a shortlist of IT staffing agencies
Email staffing agencies
Questions to ask when talking to staffing agency representatives
Select your IT staffing agency
What if you don’t know your software requirements?
If you don’t have a software engineer or someone else with the technical knowledge to define your software requirements, you can still get the ball rolling. You will mainly need two things:

Your Product Vision as a First-Step for Outsourcing should be sufficient to provide a staffing agency with enough information to deduce most of your software requirements.
Which software platforms (Windows, Mac OS, iOS, Android, etc.) do you want to target? While there are some technical aspects to that, it is largely a marketing-based decision driven by the devices your audience use.
Knowing these two items should provide staffing agencies with a good picture of the skills and experience your software project will need. This may be sufficient to delineate the requirements for simple mobile and web applications. With more complex software projects, your staffing agency representative will have additional questions for you to help fine-tune your requirements. In all likelihood though, a project manager – usually a software engineering manager – is the first person you will need to hire. This individual will have the task of spelling out your SRS in detail.

What does a typical software development team look like?
image
In Agile, there is a strong preference to stick with small teams of 4-10 members each. The overall average size of a team is 7-8 team members. The typical roles of a self-contained development team include:

Project Manager or Software Engineering Manager
Business Analyst
Frontend Developer
Backend Developer
Quality Assurance Engineer*
Quality Assurance Automation Engineer*
DevOps Engineer*
Product Designer
It’s important to note that one individual can fulfill more than one role. A QA Engineer with experience as a Business Analyst could fill both roles. It’s also possible, even likely, that you may need more than one person as a front-end developer. Some projects may require multiple teams. And, some companies may have one team for design and one for development. So, the “average team” is not a lot of help except in defining the roles your project needs, and those marked with an asterisk(*) may not be essential for simple mobile or web apps.

Note, too, that teams can scale up and down over time, according to the software development stage and life cycle. An early MVP stage project may only need an engineer, a few developers, and a designer to create a product worthy of showing investors. Then, if you receive funding, you can scale up to your full requirements for full functionality.

Outsourcing for early startups
The smoothest and easiest approach is to plan on outsourcing your software development from the very beginning. As we said before, a staffing agency is more like a business partner than a traditional vendor. Outsourcing is central to the lean startup approach. It allows you to focus on your core competencies, business goals, and development.

Insisting on hiring an in-house development team has a substantial opportunity cost. This cost comes in the form of time to place jobs, screen resumes, set up and conduct interviews through to managing the entire onboarding process. Your due diligence evaluation of the IT staffing company is something you should only need to do once and it radically streamlines your recruiting and onboarding processes from then on out. Otherwise, every time a developer leaves your team, you’ll be forced to hire a replacement. Turnover for tech startups often exceeds 25% – which is already double the already high IT industry rate of 12.3%.

It’s likely that the first role you will want to fill with outsourcing is the software engineering manager (as product manager). They will need to fully flesh out all of the technical details for your project requirements (languages, libraries, cloud services, etc.) to use. They can define for you all of the possibilities like tyes data detection/collection, features, device compatibilities, that may fit into your software idea. Working with your project vision, they’ll help you prepare a roadmap of your product’s development – useful internally, but also for showing prospective investors.

The IT outsourcing transition for SMB’s
There are four main types of situations where a small-medium-sized business may want to transition from an in-house to an outsourced software development team.

Make room for new projects.
You have an in-house team and want to focus its attention on a new project, but have other software that you must still maintain. Many projects, once out of active development, no longer need a full development team.

However, the software still needs to be maintained to guard against security vulnerabilities arising from new operating systems, changes in third-party apps. To keep your software commercially competitive, continuous improvement efforts apply across a majority of the average 7-year lifespan of most software projects.

The transition process for this scenario is pretty straightforward:

Designate an in-house project owner to oversee your outsourced team.
Your project owner determines staffing requirements with your IT Staffing Agency.
Plan for a 1-2 month hand-off period where your original team provides an hour per day to assist with the outsourced team’s orientation.
The project owner must cover onboarding as it relates to group software, the code repository, coding standards, and other materials.
It’s most efficient to bring everyone on your team aboard at the same time.
Outsourcing to streamline costs
The move to a telecommute work environment may have brought you to question the fully-loaded cost of in-house developers working from home. You’re seeing that you can reduce your software development costs by as much as 65% while retaining the same (or better) code quality and developer skill.

Changing your entire team midstream during development is complex and hugely disruptive unless properly managed. Consider giving your existing team members the option to become independent contractors able to work from home instead of laying them off. The ability to telecommute itself has a dollar value that some developers may accept. Most are not likely to be happy about it, but assisting those who prefer direct employment with letters of recommendation, referrals, and job placement assistance should dampen the blow. Of course, the more advance notice you can provide, the better.

While the process for outsourcing in this scenario is not entirely different from others, there are some additional items that are essential.

Rather than disturb the development of specific software components, take out your project roadmap. The roadmap should provide projections as to when development on one module ends so the next begins. Here, you want to have your outsourced developer ready to start a week or two before the module they are to start on should begin. They’ll need to become acquainted with other parts of your code to be productive out of the gate.
Knowing that software developers tend to change jobs every two years on average, you can tie the transition to your turnover cycle. Instead of hiring in-house replacements as developers leave, you can source the replacement through your staffing agency.
In this scenario, depending on the technical makeup of your business, it is advisable to retain at least one employee in a senior technical capacity (CTO or similar position). The best candidates to retain are software engineering managers, especially if they can double as a business analyst.

Outsourcing to expand your business
You could trim your costs or reinvest the savings to not just replace your in-house team, but add one or two additional entire development teams, depending on your location. This depends on whether you are a software development agency or the software projects are for your own business needs. The main issue is to grow your team/s in close proportion to your workload and projected growth. In these cases, your outsourcing process is quite similar to that of launching a startup from scratch – as discussed above. You can easily start off small and add team members as needed.

An R&D center and staff augmentation
Your business is ready to invest in an R&D center, but you want to accelerate the process and maximize the bang for your buck. In that link, we discuss the process for setting up an R&D center and using the staff augmentation approach. For businesses in North America and Western Europe, not only is this an expensive proposition, it could take from 6-12 months or longer to bring everything together. It could take longer if the facility needs to be built.

By taking advantage of purchasing power parity, setting up an R&D center in Ukraine easily offers a 3-to-1 cost advantage. Plus, Ukraine’s Tech Hubs (Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Lviv, and Dnepropetrovsk have fully-connected facilities available so you can get started fast (4 to 6 weeks). This is as close to a “turnkey R&D center” as you can possibly find.

A summary of the IT outsourcing process
Every business and every software development project has its own requirements. When it comes to outsourcing IT staff, the overall process is basically the same. The most important part of the process is making sure the IT Staffing Agency you select is the right one for you. They will cover a wide range of critical services for you from finding and vetting qualified software developers and IT specialists, to managing taxes and payroll, and taking most of the pain out of turnover rates among developers. Ukrainian software developers are ranked #2 globally in terms of overall value, #5 in technical skill, and have less than half the turnover rate as their US counterparts.

If you’d like to find out more about your IT Staffing options we’d love to hear from you!

How to Transition to an Outsourced Team

PerceptionBox — Tue, 29 Dec 2020 09:11:44 +0000

How do you transition to an outsourced software development team? You might be looking to make room for your in-house developers to start on a new project - but still need to maintain your existing software. You could be questioning the extra costs of having employees working from home or other scenarios. We cover the fairly simple process for outsourcing in each of these scenarios and other factors you’ll need to consider.

Read full article - https://perceptionbox.io/business/how-to-transition-to-an-outsourced-team/

Tips on 4 Monetization Options for Startups

PerceptionBox — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 07:59:48 +0000

Many businesses fail simply because they ran out of money. Here we discuss four monetization models that are often ignored or not optimally applied and how easily they fit into your development plans.

One goal of your monetization strategy probably should be to maximize your average lifetime revenue per user. The monetization options you adopt should fit your branding, which may preclude some options (like in-app advertising). The support requirements of others may initially exceed your budget and/or team’s capabilities (newsletters or data products). Even so, you can always expand your options as your business evolves. Including them in your software development plans early on can save you substantial expense later.

Days or even weeks could be discussed on all of the monetization options available to businesses today. The four options discussed below are meant to provide a smorgasbord of “food for thought” for startups – but can be valuable to SMB’s, too.

Read full article here: https://perceptionbox.io/business/tips-on-4-monetization-options-for-startups/

Staffing Agency vs. Direct Hires: The Opportunity Cost for Startup Founders

PerceptionBox — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 07:58:45 +0000

As a tech startup founder, should you hire directly or work with an IT staffing agency? As we’re about to show, hiring people takes a significant amount of time and effort.

Moreover, beyond simply hiring, many tech startups report turnover rates of 25% or higher. Should the hiring effort be on you as your startup’s visionary and strategic driving force? One thing to consider is the opportunity cost of managing your hiring process or vetting an IT staffing agency.

Read original blog post Staffing Agency vs. Direct Hires: The Opportunity Cost for Startup Founders

PerceptionBox.io

PerceptionBox — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 12:03:11 +0000

WE BUILD & SCALE dedicated delivery teams for startups and SMBs

SUPERCHARGE the process of product development by building and scaling your software teams and R&D centers with top remote talent (flexible staffing and full- time staffing)

ELIMINATE HASSLE of searching, interviewing, hiring, and taking care of the administration and payroll of employees

WE OFFER Developers (Fullstack, Frontend, Backend, Mobile, DevOps, Gaming, & more). And any kind of tech talent you will need

Benefits of working with PerceptionBox

→ Fast turnaround, low employee markup, and highly scalable teams

→ You have 100% utilization rate (contractors work under your authority)

→ We recruit contract employees and act as the employer of record

PerceptionBox provides clients with custom full-cycle web and mobile application development services. In simpler words, we help businesses grow in today's world of innovative technologies. Our team consists of senior-level engineers, business analysts and consultants became a powerful asset to 20+ clients over the last two years. With PerceptionBox your business can access a team of 1 to 20 trained and equipped developers in a heartbeat. No need for recruiting or back-office pains. If you work with us, results are all you get.

Incubators and Accelerators for Startups

PerceptionBox — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 11:45:13 +0000

Startup incubators and accelerators make it easier to raise startup funding and launch a better business faster than ever before. While seed funding is always helpful, that’s not all these investor services offer today’s entrepreneurs. Though these venues are not the only ways to generate startup funding - they are the perfect starting point for a few articles that we want to devote to helping your startup or small business reach the next level in its development plans.

Full article - https://perceptionbox.io/business/incubators-and-accelerators-for-startups/

Israel’s Top 5 Startup Accelerators in 2020

PerceptionBox — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 11:34:12 +0000

The original article Israel’s Top 5 Startup Accelerators in 2020 was written on our company's blog.

As a tech startup founder, should you hire directly or work with an IT staffing agency? As we’re about to show, hiring people takes a significant amount of time and effort. Moreover, beyond simply hiring, many tech startups report turnover rates of 25% or higher. Should the hiring effort be on you as your startup’s visionary and strategic driving force? One thing to consider is the opportunity cost of managing your hiring process or vetting an IT staffing agency.

Human Resources in startups

Most startups don’t have a Human Resources Team. Early on, it’s not uncommon for startups to have one or two people handling all administrative, payroll, legal, and HR program activity on a part-time or shared-duty basis. Sometimes that’s the founder, or perhaps the founder’s spouse. Though it’s advisable to set up an HR program as early as possible, a dedicated HR manager (or team) probably isn’t necessary until you have more than 50 employees.

To save you time getting started, business-in-a-box offers HR Handbook Template. Not having an HR policy of any sort can exacerbate turnover. It’s basic, but you can develop it to better suit your needs as time permits… without having to start from scratch.

Sourcing through an IT staffing agency

The entire role of an IT staffing agency is to find, vet, and provide HR support for companies who need IT specialists. In all cases, we recommend for founders and other hiring managers to do their due diligence before signing any contract. The vetting process makes sure that the agency you select has the experience and staff with the right skills, and terms, for your project.

You advise the agency about your situation, project requirements, funding restraints, and calendar goals. The agency matches your project requirements to the skills of candidates in their existing pool and determines if they need to find additional specialists. You’re provided an interview opportunity before they start.

Your newly outsourced IT specialists work for you, even though they are employed by the agency. If one needs to leave your project for any reason, they are obliged to give advance notice so a suitable replacement can be brought on. Further, the wages of an outsourced developer in Ukraine run around $50k per year compared to a $108k US-based average which can tack on up to another $20-50k for taxes, insurance, office space, and other overhead. Developers in Ukraine and most of Eastern Europe actually rank higher in technical skills than their US counterparts.

Evaluating several staffing agencies is likely to take around 6-8 hours. Your project review and agreement is then likely to take about 2-3 hours. Figure it will be an investment of 8-12 hours after which your hands are free to focus on developing your startup. From first contact with a staffing agency to having your outsourced team ready to start can take as little as two weeks. Large and complex staffing requirements will take longer, between four and six weeks.

The process of directly hiring employees

Directly hiring employees is a more involved, time-consuming process. Many startups begin with one or a few co-founders dividing up duties according to their strengths - i.e. CEO, CTO, CMO.

Most often it is the CEO or CTO conducting the hiring as an “added duty” - but not usually borne of experience as a hiring manager. You’ll be looking at four stages in the hiring process.

Stage One. You need to hire someone!

Define the skill sets you need.
Write the job description.
Decide where to post it.

Each stage takes time. If you’re proactive, you can get the job description written and posted on the same day. Preparing detailed job descriptions tends to attract better candidates. So, it’s more likely this process will take a few days to a week to make sure you get everything right.

Stage Two. Make sure you’re hiring qualified people.

Receive applications.
Review applications to trim the obviously unqualified (Keep the top 20%).
Conduct first Interviews (Typically 1 interview per 5 applicants, but variable).

It’s a good time management practice to do “like tasks” together, so you’ll want to wait until you have a decent number of applications. That can vary for many reasons. There are the emails or phone calls back and forth to arrange an interview. Interviews average up to an hour each.

Stage Three. Now to make and vet your shortlist.

Background and referral checks.
Follow-up interviews, discuss benefits, and negotiation.
Hire, sign the contract, NDA’s, etc.

Once you have the candidates lined-up that you’re thinking about hiring - you’ll need to decide on the standards for your background check. Did they graduate from MIT? Do they have a criminal record? Do the references they provided recommend them as skilled developers? You may weed out some during the process of vetting your shortlist.

Stage Four. The New Hire Transition.

A transition period (2 weeks notice to the former employer, etc.)
Tax filing and benefits enrollment.
Project onboarding, review coding standards, work processes, etc.

After you’ve signed an agreement with your new employee/s, it’s standard practice for each to give their current employer two weeks of notice. Even then, throughout 2019 and despite COVID-19, ghosting has been a major headache for recruiters at all stages of the hiring process. This includes candidates who have been hired, but who no-show on the day they’re supposed to start.

Hiring takes at least a month, often much more

Everything considered, if everything runs smoothly, you’re looking at a minimum of one month to bring on an employee. Even the best startup founders can be overly optimistic about their time when posting, reviewing, and scheduling interviews. The process can be drawn out to 2-3 months. The number of hours you spend in the hiring process will vary by how many interviews you conduct per position, and whether you’re hiring all at once or in stages.

Finding qualified and experienced candidates can be more difficult in two additional cases.

Hiring Locally: Qualified developers can go pretty much wherever they want and find a job fairly easily. It can be very difficult to attract the talent you need if you insist on having in-house developers as employees outside of a tech hub. An extreme example of this is the entire state of Iowa.

Premium Positions: From Multimedia Designers, Software Developers, and Engineers to Security Management Specialists, the full range of software development roles can be hard to fill. It’s not so much a lack of applications that’s at issue, as the lack of qualifications by those applying for the jobs.

Add issues of retention - up to 25% of your first your tech start-up hires won’t last a full year.

Cost Opportunity - outsourcing vs. hiring

Working with an IT staffing agency to manage your personnel and skill requirements is an Agile “vet once - hire many” process. Hiring employees directly is a labor-intensive process for a founder - and appropriate on a strategic basis as relates to your core team. Every hour spent reviewing applications and conducting interviews is an hour that you aren’t finding new clients, talking with investors, developing connections, and trying to cut deals.

And that’s what makes the time spent vetting an IT staffing agency so valuable - you’re investing in finding a long-term partner. If successful, you can count on having the right team composition on your project every step along the way of your startup’s evolution. We’ve covered the cost advantages of outsourcing vs. hiring before, but the Founder and CEO’s time - and that of their fellow partners has a strategic value. Later, when you’re established, profitable, and still growing, you can hire an HR team of your own.

What Deep Learning Can Offer to Business

PerceptionBox — Sun, 14 Oct 2018 09:21:53 +0000

The original article What Deep Learning Can Offer to Business was written on our corporate Medium blog.

To begin with, we’re here to emphasize once again that first of all, machine learning is a great tool to boost revenues and, if it happens, a nice side effect of using machine learning development is about to bring down the costs. What’s more, this notion is essential to remember when speaking on principles that make machine learning tick in business realm for the main goal of any company is to sell and do it right being its information, products or services.

But you are probably wondering what the steps to roaring trade are. Here, you need to ask yourself three important questions and decide what to sell, who your target audience is and how to attract their eyes and ears to your brand. Beyond that, you also need to pick the right timing to go all in selling. In a nutshell, machine learning can help to weight all the option when replying to any of these questions.

Still, when you want to have it all at once and get the answers quickly, it might burn a hole in our pocket and affect margins. Therefore, today you cannot do without a human touch when dealing with deep learning technology.

One more thing which is worthy of mention is that machine learning generally is keened on the business efficiency boosting however sometimes it helps not only to generate more revenue but AI can help you to lower your business costs as well.

Targeting

To orchestrate the targeting process and tap into each of What? Who to? And When? questions, you’ll find a handful of different tools out there. First off, recommendation systems, sales suites, and marketing instruments come to mind.

Harnessing the power of Neural Deep Learning Networks, these brainy tools can easily guess what a user wants (if any) and tailor the suggestion according to his profile.

For instance, if you’re bored and can’t decide how to spend your evening, it’s raining outside and you’re absolutely not in a mood to head out, movix.ai can bail you out. The engine resembles a smart cinema that helps users with choices in real time.

The idea behind the online service is that a user visits the website, clicks on a few titles he likes (maybe he made up his mind this very moment and usually wouldn’t go for Avatar) and after the system powered by deep learning offers firms he might like. Voila! Time to grab popcorn!

Another great example is a shopping spree. Often times, this type of development pays attention to what users do on an ecommerce website, learns from user experience and based on historical data builds up machine learning affinities to help users choose among a myriad of options. For instance, Strands helps to personalize the shopping experience of every visitor.

By learning behaviors of the online crowd, the engine gathers individual insights and aggregates the data after helping retailers with better sales.

Furthermore, deep learning comes handy when you speak of CRM and predictive lead scoring. Getting rid of guesswork can save a lot of efforts and help pinpoint sales-ready leads quickly. Mintigo, for instance, defines marketing indicators mining data from the web and mergers those with client’s CRM giving a 360-degree profile of every prospect.

The company utilizes machine learning and keeps an eye on a digital footprint of thousands of firms online, refines the data to mine meaningful insights helping with sales decisions.

Computer vision

Computer vision steps into the picture when you’re racking your brain on what exactly and how to sell it to your target audience. The science behind image processing by computers is a complex subject but seasoned deep learning practitioners would agree it’s a revolution. For starters, computer vision eliminates the typical mistakes of humans that get their attention scattered when multitasking and thus, might lose concentration. By doing several things at a time with great precision, companies that bring on board machine learning can significantly speed up their development and lower down the production costs without sacrificing the quality of offerings.

Think of TensorFlow that offers its library for free to those willing to go knee-deep into machine learning models. With a varying level of abstraction, this open-source library is a godsend for numerical computation pros.

You must have heard another story of Japanese farmers automating their farming business partially and outsourcing some tasks to machine learning such as… sorting cucumbers. A tech-savvy son of the local farmers came up with the idea to use TensorFlow to classify the veggies into categories. For three month the engineer was taking photos and grading cucumbers to teach the model sorting to get rid of manual sorting reaching a 95% accuracy over time.

Optimization and Tuning

That’s the what to sell problem-solving example in the real world. You can produce thousands of products and offer services in tons of various ways. Now consider the potential of deep learning adding value and help you choose the most effective approach to do so. To brew better beer, the Virginia-based brewery decided to optimize its operations and joined the ties with machine learning firm. The brewing experts gave the tech vendor the data on Great American Beer Festival IPAs so that those can be aligned with top ten country’s best sellers. The result was dynamic recipes that would alter with every new batch after the feedback from beer fans is collected and processed.

Kill Bureaucracy

Saying “No” to red tape, isn’t it freaking amazing? Machine learning can go an extra mile and help process fewer papers and being able to concentrate on taking your minds off the routine tasks that take way too much time to handle.

Offering automated patent search, the company saves tons of time on document screening and reviews. After experimenting with historical invalidity cases, Amplified created a quick and easy-to-use system powered by machine learning that refines the search singles out three to five results picking the most relevant among hundreds of documents. With such an intelligent development, the necessity for a professional human searcher and its opinion becomes a blur in seconds.

What’s the bottom line here?

No one likes to spend precious funds on things that could be easily passed to deep learning and smart algorithms that take less time to process big data and come up with meaningful insights in a blink of an eye.