The Rise and Rise of Offshore Product Development

The early adopters of offshore product development were motivated by the need to cut their costs, decrease time to market and take up new projects by leveraging the expertise of the suppliers. But as one says change is the only constant, it applies in the case of offshore product development too. While companies continue to offshore the product development, it is no more limited to coding of the product or offshoring of low key services. In the recent years it has been noticed that most companies adopt long term strategic approach towards offshore product development. Suppliers have grown to become strategic partners who share the opportunities and the risks.

The drivers of offshore product development are:

·         Improved quality of software

Organizations need to focus various function to drive excellence and increase profitability. Whereas, in most cases the suppliers selected for the offshore product development have a 100% focus on developing world class products. They have the required skills, expertise and access to latest technology. This ensures high quality of software developed and delivery.

·         Better scalability

Nowadays, the business environment is quite volatile resulting in sudden changes in the business goals. Organizations needs to be prepared to tackle the opportunities and challenges that come with it. The option of offshore product development enables organizations to scale up to grab the opportunities without any loss of time. They can develop and manage the project which wouldn’t have been possible to execute in house.

·         Sourcing of niche expertise

Technology is ever evolving at a very fast pace. Organizations have realised that it is affordable and time saving to hire resources for hard to find or niche technologies. It is expensive to hire a professional with a niche skillset for a particular project as it is for a limited timeframe. It is easy to source these service and augment your existing teams. Offshore product development also helps in streamlining the process for product development.

·         Increased flexibility

Traditionally to accomplish a project organizations typically relied on hiring the professionals with required skillset. With the onset of offshore product development organizations can choose a suitable outsourcing partner to scale up and down depending on their business needs. This gives organizations to accomplish their project without the hassle of recruitment and layoffs. Also with the newer product development methodologies like agile the software development process has become transparent. This gives organization the flexibility to propose the product requirements in parallel to the product development. Hence there is no time wasted in to and fro and the final product developed is as aligned to requirements.

While there are several benefits of offshore product development one needs to be cautious while selecting the service providers. Also is it important to understand which functions should be outsourced as you might want to work on your core functions in house.