Insights
How to choose an IT outsourcing partner
The right partner is the one whose people can do your work and who communicates the way your team does. A checklist for the conversations before you sign.
1. Start from your goal
Write down what you need before talking to providers: a product built, a team extended, or infrastructure looked after. Note the technologies, the time zone overlap you need and how long you expect the work to last. It makes proposals comparable.
2. Check relevant experience
- Ask for work similar to yours: the same platform, technology or type of product.
- Ask what went wrong on a past project and what they changed afterwards.
- Prefer concrete answers about how something was built over general claims.
3. Meet the people who will do the work
Talk to the engineers who would join your project, not only to sales. A short technical conversation tells you more about their experience and English than any presentation.
4. Agree how you will communicate
- Shared working hours and the time zone difference.
- Which tools you use: chat, tracker, code repository.
- How often you see progress: demos, reports, pull requests.
- Who your day-to-day contact is.
5. Settle ownership and access
Make sure the code, cloud accounts, designs and documentation belong to your company from the first day. Ideally the work happens in your own repositories and accounts.
6. Start small
Begin with a limited first step, such as one engineer, a short discovery phase or a single feature, and decide on the next step once you have seen how the team works.