Hiring in India takes two to four months from job post to productive, and the failure rate is high enough that most companies have a story about it. A dedicated team is the alternative when the work is real and continuous but the headcount case is not yet obvious.
A dedicated team is engineers, designers or marketers working exclusively on your product on a monthly retainer, inside your tools and rituals. It differs from project work in that you direct the priorities, and from hiring in that there is no recruitment cycle, notice period or payroll.
Against two to four months for a direct hire in India, before probation risk.
Scale down in a month rather than managing a severance conversation.
The people on your team are not split across three other clients that week.
No agency percentage, no job board spend, no six weeks of interviewing.
Team proposal and rate card
Team profiles and an intro call
First merged pull request
Fortnightly delivery
Monthly review and adjusted plan
There is a quarter of engineering work in front of you and no signed-off headcount. So it gets squeezed into the existing team, who are already behind, and everything slips together. Meanwhile a hire would take four months to be productive even if it were approved today.
It is not always. Here is where it works and, honestly, where it does not.
Runway pressure to ship before the next raise, with hiring cycles that will not fit inside it.
A squad shipping within a fortnight, scalable down after the milestone.
A single in-house developer who is also the entire bus factor and cannot take leave.
Two of our engineers alongside them, with shared code review and documentation.
Winning more work than the team can deliver, and turning it down or delivering it late.
A white-label squad working inside your process and your repositories.
Internal IT booked for eighteen months, so business units build shadow spreadsheets.
An external team taking one queue of work with clear boundaries and security controls.
A skill needed for six weeks — data engineering, mobile, infrastructure — that no full-time role justifies.
That specialist for those weeks, with knowledge transfer built into the engagement.
Engineers designing screens between tickets, so the product looks like four products.
An embedded designer at two or three days a week, maintaining the system.
The model fails in predictable ways. All of them are about integration rather than about skill.
The team works from your tracker, in your priority order. A separate backlog produces a separate product and two teams arguing about which is real.
Stand-ups, planning and retrospectives together. An embedded team excluded from planning is a vendor with a nicer name.
We review your team's pull requests and they review ours. It is the fastest knowledge transfer mechanism there is, and it keeps standards shared.
Decision records and runbooks written during the engagement, so nothing walks out with us if the team scales down.
The roles and seniority mix proposed against your actual backlog, rather than whoever happens to be free.
Access, environment setup, codebase walkthrough and a first shipped change within the first week.
Hours of overlap, communication channels, escalation path, definition of done and how priorities get changed mid-sprint.
Working inside your process — or ours if you would rather borrow one that already functions.
Two-way review, agreed conventions, and CI enforcing them rather than a document nobody reads.
Architecture decisions, runbooks and handover notes written continuously.
What shipped, what is in progress, what is blocked, and where the time went.
Thirty days' notice, a knowledge transfer window and a handover pack. Agreed at the start, when it is easy to agree.
Hiring a developer in India takes two to four months from job post to productive, and the failure rate is high enough that most companies have a story about it. A dedicated team is the alternative when the work is real and continuous but the headcount case is not yet obvious.
Engineers, designers or marketers working exclusively on your product, inside your tracker and your stand-ups, on a monthly retainer. It differs from project work in that you set the priorities and they can change weekly, and from hiring in that there is no recruitment cycle, notice period or payroll.
| In-house | Fixed-price project | Dedicated team | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to start | 2–4 months | 2–4 weeks | 1–2 weeks |
| Control of priorities | Full | Limited to scope | Full |
| Handles changing needs | Well | Badly | Well |
| Scale down | Hard | Automatic | 30 days |
The deciding variable is how stable your requirements are, not the hourly rate. Stable and defined argues for a fixed-price project; continuous and moving argues for a team. The longer comparison is in staff augmentation versus outsourcing.
A small in-house core who own the product knowledge, augmented by an external team for delivery capacity. The core keeps the context; the capacity flexes with the roadmap. We are explicitly happy to transfer capability to your internal hires as they arrive — an agency that makes itself indispensable is optimising for its own retention rather than for your business.
Every stage ends in something you can hold — a document, a build, a live account. If a stage cannot name its output, it is a meeting, not a stage.
What the backlog contains, which roles it needs, and whether a dedicated team is genuinely the right answer.
Named people with the relevant experience, introduced to your team before anything is signed.
Access, environments and context, aiming for a shipped change in the first week.
Sprints inside your process, with two-way code review and honest reporting on what did not get done.
Monthly review of composition and priorities — scale up, scale down, or change the mix.
Everything here is part of the engagement at no extra cost. We do not itemise them on an invoice and we do not withhold them if you leave.
You meet the actual engineers and designers on a call first. No profiles swapped after signing.
We review your team's pull requests and they review ours. It is the fastest knowledge transfer there is and it costs nothing extra.
Decision records and runbooks produced during the engagement, so nothing walks out with us if the team scales down.
Plus a knowledge transfer window and a handover pack, settled at the start when it is easy to settle.
We would rather tell you early and change the person, or end it, than keep invoicing quietly.
Longer answers to the questions people ask before they hire anyone for dedicated teams.
Built by us, free, no signup, nothing uploaded to a server. Take them whether or not you ever become a client.
It depends on seniority and specialism, and it is billed monthly with thirty days' notice. What is not in it: recruitment fees, job board spend, six weeks of interviewing, notice periods or payroll. We propose a team composition against your actual backlog and price that.
Tell us what you have now and what you are trying to reach. We will audit it and tell you what we would do, what it would cost and whether you need us at all. The audit is free and yours to keep.