Dedicated Development Teams: Definition, Benefits, and Hiring Tips

Building an in-house development team for your digital project can be time-consuming and costly. From sourcing the right talent to managing HR and cultural fit, the process requires a significant investment of time and money. 

But what if there were an alternative that gives you access to a full team of skilled experts—without the hassles of traditional hiring? 

Dedicated development teams offer exactly that. These teams provide the specialized talent you need and are fully focused on your project while keeping costs manageable. 

Curious about how a dedicated team could elevate your project? Let’s dive into what they are, how they work, and why they’re a smart choice for today’s businesses.

Table of Contents

• What is a dedicated team?
• Dedicated team vs. managed services
• Benefits of hiring a dedicated software team
• Dedicated team structure: Who is in a dedicated development team?
• How much does it cost to hire a dedicated development team?
• How to hire a dedicated development team
• When to hire dedicated development teams?
• Cheesecake Labs’ dedicated team services

What is a dedicated team?

Just like the name suggests, a dedicated team, or a dedicated development team, is a group of tech professionals who are solely dedicated to working on your project. Teams often include developers, designers, product and project managers, and any other professional you need to create incredible digital products. 

Unlike other IT outsourcing methods that assign tasks to individual remote tech professionals (who may be working across multiple projects), a dedicated team essentially lets you slot in a whole, experienced team that already knows how to work together and is solely focused on your project. It essentially gives you the benefits of hiring an in-house development team without the higher in-house costs. 

You can use a dedicated team to act as your entire engineering department or use them to add skill and scale to your existing team. You can hire a dedicated development team based on your requirements without worrying about HR admin tasks, such as hiring, recruitment, onboarding, and training efforts and costs.

While you can build dedicated teams for designing or testing your application, the best use case is engineering and development because that’s the part that takes the most time, effort, and overall resources.

Learn more about hiring in-house versus outsourcing software development.

Dedicated team vs. managed services: are they different?

Sometimes, IT outsourcing providers will use the term “managed services” or “managed team” instead of “dedicated team” to describe this type of service. They can mean the same thing, but that’s not always true.

Sometimes, managed services can mean outsourcing the management of an entire IT or business service or task to another company.

Businesses often choose managed services for tech tasks like network monitoring, security, and cloud management. These agreements tend to be ongoing without a specific goal in mind. 

Now, technically, when you hire a dedicated team to fully engineer, design, test, and deploy an app, you’re hiring another company to manage the service of building an app.

But, in our experience, managed services usually refer to longer-running agreements and ongoing tasks. 

At Cheesecake Labs, we like to use the term dedicated development teams because it’s more defined. 

If you’re looking to hire a dedicated development team but find a company calling it “managed services,” just double-check what they’re offering under that heading and ensure it aligns with your needs.

Also read: Staff Augmentation vs Managed Services: Which Is Best?

Benefits of hiring a dedicated software team

There are some great benefits of IT outsourcing with a dedicated software development team. Here are just a few:

• Access to experts: The dedicated team model lets you access expertise that your in-house team might lack.
• Move faster/more efficiently: Hiring dedicated resources experienced in what they do will help you improve efficiency and reduce development time significantly. This can help you bring your product to market more quickly. 
• More flexibility and easy scaling: With a dedicated development team, you can add or remove resources as needed, making scaling up or down easier.
• Save money/mitigate financial risk: Hiring in-house employees can get expensive because you have to take care of admin tasks, pay a competitive salary, cover insurance, set up infrastructure, go through employee onboarding, and more. Hiring remote dedicated development teams is affordable because you’re paying a pre-agreed price for your specific project — without any of the in-house overhead.
• Tried and tested tools and processes: Experienced dedicated development teams are already used to working together and have tested processes in place. They know what tools work best for specific tasks and can get you the best results possible with proven methods.

Learn more about the benefits and advantages of IT outsourcing with a dedicated team.

Dedicated team structure: Who is in a dedicated development team?

While the exact makeup of a dedicated team of developers will vary depending on your project’s specific needs, there are some common roles your team might include:

• Tech Lead: Tech Leads (or Engineering Managers) are experienced software engineers who ensure the quality of the software development dedicated team and focus on the technical aspects of the software development.
• Product Manager: Product managers help plan and execute the entire product lifecycle. They identify the customer needs and other business objectives you aim to fulfill with your product and ensure that it meets your standards.
• Project Manager: Project managers help plan, execute, control, monitor, and finally complete the project on time and, most importantly, within the budget.
• Backend Developer: Backend developers handle development aspects like building APIs, receiving and sending data via APIs, logic, and managing the server.
• Frontend Developer: Frontend developers focus on the client side of the product/app. They work on what users see and interact with, including the user interface (buttons, text fields, etc.). Their work on the UI helps define the UX of the app.
• Quality Assurance Tester: Quality assurance testers help the developers find and fix bugs and UI issues. They help create test cases and run them repeatedly, ensuring a glitch-free, high-quality end product.
• DevOps Engineer: DevOps is a set of industry best practices that significantly shorten and improve the software development process. A DevOps engineer implements DevOps throughout the software development lifecycle, including, but not limited to, responsibilities related to CI/CD pipelines, architecture, cloud computing, IT security, etc.
• UX/UI Designers: UI designers decide how an application looks. On the other hand, UX designers focus on the user experience. They interact with the app like a real user and suggest improvements to improve the end-user experience.

How much does it cost to hire a dedicated development team?

The cost of hiring dedicated development teams depends on your requirements, like how large or complex the project is, what technologies you want to use, how many experts you need, and for how long. But whatever the cost is, it will be far less than hiring a team of in-house developers.

The best way to get an accurate estimate for your project is to get in touch with different dedicated team providers and see what they quote for your project. 

In our experience, building a custom-designed and developed MVP costs between $100,000 to $300,000. This price changes depending on how simple or complex your app is — complexity takes more time, a bigger team, and more money. 

Learn more about all the details that determine how much it costs to build an app.

How to hire a dedicated development team 

To ensure you select a team that aligns well with your vision and project needs, it’s essential to approach the hiring process strategically.

Here’s a quick step-by-step guide to hiring the right dedicated team of developers for you:

1. Have a clear vision for your product

For your team to hit the ground running, they’ll need a clear understanding of your project. Typically, a product is ready for development (and a dedicated engineering team) once the following assets have been created:

• Customer journey map
• Low fidelity wireframes
• High fidelity, interactive wireframes or prototype
• User navigation flows

If you’re yet to complete the above stages of the development process, then opting for full project delivery (a.k.a. software outsourcing) might be a better option. 

2. Define your budget

Make sure you’ve got a realistic budget in mind. It’s a good idea to go in with a general idea of what you want to spend while leaving a buffer for scope creep and unexpected expenses.

As you talk to different dedicated team providers, they’ll be able to give you a better idea of how much your project will likely cost. 

3. Explore the IT development outsourcing market

Get to know which companies offer dedicated developer services. Browsing sites like Clutch can give you an idea of the types of projects companies have worked on and what their past clients think. 

4. Choose where to hire a dedicated development team from

You might be tempted to look for the cheapest possible dedicated team to keep costs down, but it might cost you more in the long run. 

Extremely low-cost outsourcing from countries like India can be appealing. There are pros and cons of IT outsourcing to India:

• Pros include keeping costs down, getting access to a broad talent pool, and being able to choose from a range of services.
• Cons include cultural differences, time zone differences, security concerns, management issues, and quality concerns.

Usually, those trade-offs aren’t worth the low-low prices. Instead, opt for nearshore outsourcing to regions like Latin America. Latin American countries like Brazil are tech titans and offer excellent options for dedicated teams of developers. 

5. Interview potential project partners

Now it’s time to get to know more about potential IT outsourcing firms. It’s a good idea to ask companies about: 

• How they find, train, and hire their developers;
• How their dedicated team process works;
• How much visibility you’ll have over the project as a whole;
• If they specialize in certain types of projects and industries;
• And if they have testimonials from previous clients.

6. Choose a team that aligns with your needs

Based on your interviews, it’s time to choose a company and team that best fits your project, working style, and budget.

The best choice will be able to promise (and deliver) high-quality results on your timescale within your budget.

Want some more key advice for hiring the best possible team? We’ve got a great guide to choosing the right IT outsourcing partner. 

When to hire dedicated development teams?

A dedicated team can help you no matter what stage your project is at. Here, at Cheesecake Labs, we often work with clients who already have a roadmap and a plan, clients who have wireframes and UI, and clients who have just started the Product Definition phase. 

That said, it can vary.

Let’s say you’ve already completed the product definition and product design phases and have just started product development but you need to work faster than your in-house team can manage.

A dedicated development team can help you pick up the pace and achieve your goals faster. 

No matter what app-building phase you’re in, you can reach out to a dedicated development team and improve your app-building process.

And, of course, different companies use dedicated development teams to meet different goals. For example: 

• If you’re an early-stage startup, using a dedicated development team could be the best idea. A dedicated team will help you develop your product more efficiently, and you can avoid a lengthy and expensive hiring process. Instead, your team can focus on the tasks at hand while your dedicated team handles everything else.

• If you’re an established business with a long-term project in mind but aren’t sure how much time and resources it would take, dedicated development teams are a great option. Because dedicated development teams are flexible, they’ll adapt to your needs and can scale up and down over time as required.

The decision of when to hire a dedicated team is ultimately up to you. No matter where you are in the development process, a good dedicated team will be able to work with you, as an extension of your own team, to help you finish your project as smoothly as possible.

Why work with Cheesecake Labs for dedicated development team services?

At Cheesecake Labs we’ve been offering dedicated development team services for almost a decade and have completed lots of exciting projects in that time.

We’re a team of experienced designers, project managers, engineers, and tech enthusiasts who work together to help you create digital solutions for real-world problems. We have the experience and the skills you need to develop a successful product.

Most importantly, we work with you however you work best to make your idea a reality.

Here’s how our dedicated team process works:

1. Putting together your perfect team
2. Onboarding and introductions
3. Development phase
4. Weekly check-ins with your team
5. Dedicated Customer Success Manager
6. Transparency, communication, and collaboration

Now, let’s detail each step of our process:

Putting together your perfect team

After learning more about your project, we’ll determine who should be part of your dedicated team. For that, we’ll pair you with a Solutions Architect who will work with you to determine your needs, understand your goals, discuss if you have a process in place, and ultimately provide you with the resources and team you need to be successful.

Onboarding and introductions

When we’re ready to start the project, Cheesecake Labs will spend a week internally to fully immerse in the project. That includes reviewing all of your notes captured by the solution architect, meetings you’ve had with our teams, and any other information you’ve supplied us with. 

We’ll look at what needs to be incorporated to make this project a success and the technical challenges that we might face. That way, we can ensure everyone is on the same page, has the full context, and is ready to start. 

This also means you don’t have to repeat the same points over and over again. We’ll make sure that your team is up to speed so that you can focus on getting to work and delivering instructions. 

Development phase

This is where wheels touch the ground, and we start to make progress. As you might expect, this phase is very different from one client to the next. It will all depend on your needs, requirements, challenges, scope, and progress you’ve already made on your end. 

Weekly check-ins with your team

Once a week (or more if needed!), you’ll meet with your team, who will check in and update you on various progress and details surrounding your project. This way, you’re never left in the dark or caught off guard. 

The goal of these regular meetings is to make sure that your project is constantly adapting and realigning.

And in between meetings, we provide a Slack channel where we collaborate and have discussions in real time. 

Dedicated Customer Success Manager

We’ll assign you a dedicated Customer Success Manager for your project. They are your voice within Cheesecake Labs, whose sole job is to represent your interests during development.

They’ll be there when you can’t be, ensuring that the work never strays from your vision and they will help to re-align and adjust as needed throughout the process. 

Transparency, communication, and collaboration

Transparency, communication, and collaboration are the core values that we work toward. Everything Cheesecake Labs does maps back to these values. We want you and your dedicated team to always know what’s happening, changing, and working. 

And the best way for these values to work successfully is for all of us to work together. We want you to think of your Cheesecake Labs dedicated team as an extension of your team.

We’re here to work with you in tandem and in sync. 

The right team with the right skills to help you create digital excellence

Part of what makes working with Cheesecake Labs such a great and valuable experience is that we’re not just offering you a team of developers.

We have the experience, expertise, and insight to keep things running smoothly, on time, and within your requirements. 

Reach out to our team of experts today and see how a Cheesecake Labs dedicated team can take your project, concept, and work to the next level. 

We can’t wait to help bring your ideas to life!