How to Build a Successful Software Development Team: 12 Critical Factors

According to a global survey of teams, 61% noted improved communication as a result of properly built communication and team-building efforts, which ultimately had a positive impact on the quality of their work. This directly indicates that initiatives aimed at optimizing interaction between specialists working on a single project pay off, even in the short term. We, as a company that has been working in various formats on the international IT services market for over 25 years, are ready to share our insights on how to build a successful development team in this article.

Why Software Team Composition Matters

When it comes to creating a digital product, most project managers and tech leads first think about the correctness of the stack, architecture, user experience, and other things directly related to software development. However, they often overlook equally critical factors related to building a dev team, i.e., the team structure and responsibilities. However, the project's success directly depends on how the team is organized, who works in it, and what competencies they have. Actually, this is how it affects business results: 

• Time to market. A correctly assembled team, where each member understands both their individual and common goals and areas of responsibility, can quickly go from an idea to a finished product, without delaying the process due to problems like: “I didn’t know that I had to do this task, too” or “I didn’t fully understand my task.” This is especially critical for startups, when the time to market determines whether your product will be presented to the audience before your competitors.
• The product’s code quality and stability. When the team has an optimal balance of experience, and the code review, CI/CD, and testing processes are properly built, this significantly reduces the risk of hard-to-fix bugs, technical debt, and unexpected failures in production. At the same time, this does not mean that it should consist of only Seniors – it is only important to distribute roles correctly and ensure the proper balancing of Senior and Junior developers.
• Flexibility. Teams where communication is based on trust and open feedback are more likely to implement effective, but non-standard solutions and technological innovations. Ultimately, this can become a fundamental competitive advantage for your product, especially in overcrowded niches.

Based on these insights, it is important to make the right choice between in-house, outsourced, and hybrid team-building models. Therefore, let's analyze the specifics of each of them below.

In-house team

Such a team has the deepest understanding of the product, its business logic, and long-term goals since it is located with you in the same office and under your complete control.

Due to this, its management and performance monitoring are simplified. Also, in-house teams react to changes faster than others and are characterized by a strong internal culture and motivation.

At the same time, hiring software engineers for an in-house team is expensive (after all, it is important to take into account not only the peculiarities of the local labor market but also taxes, employment nuances, etc.) and time-consuming – usually, the search for specialists, especially at a high level or with a narrow specialization, takes months. There are also high risks of burnout and turnover, especially if your company does not yet have mature HR processes and career growth. 

Considering all the pros and cons, it becomes clear that this software development team structure will be the best choice only for product companies and startups with a long-term development plan. 

Outsourced team

A team of this format will provide you with a quick start. Due to the fact that your technical partner will already have specialists in all the necessary areas, it will take no more than a couple of weeks to prepare for work and agree on all the formalities.

Also, such teams are scalable – you can quickly increase or decrease the team composition depending on the project phase. Moreover, if your contractor is located in a country with lower labor costs, you receive the opportunity to save money. 

At the same time, if your technical partner has not passed the proper validation, you may hire inexperienced specialists, and as a result, will have to redo the product from scratch with a new partner. In addition, external teams are not always able to immerse themselves in the project at the proper level. 

Therefore, this option is optimal only for short-term tasks, R&D projects, pilot projects, as well as in cases where you need to fill a vacancy with rare skills. 

Hybrid model

This model demonstrates an optimal balance: you entrust the main roles (in particular, CTO, Team Lead, PM, architect, etc.) to full-time employees, while the remaining tasks are delegated to external teams.

In this case, you get unprecedented flexibility (without risks to the quality of the final solution) and sustainability for growth (for example, if you need to enter new markets or expand functionality). 

The main problem in implementing this approach is the complexity of organizing the dev team communication flow and shared access to knowledge. Also, this model directly depends on the maturity of internal processes – without a well-established core team, it is unlikely to be viable. 

In general, if you are focused on constant growth and have an ongoing need for rapid expansion and support for several areas of development, you should consider this option.

As for our experience, we work in the last two formats, and can also provide you with individual specialists who will integrate into your corporate culture and processes. You can also delegate individual tasks to us – for example, testing, as in this case, where we had the opportunity to collaborate with a Fintech company. After establishing effective communication with the client’s internal team, we got to work, ensuring 100% test coverage across critical project features, implementing more than 500 test cases, introducing automated testing to reduce the client’s time, and thereby implementing more than 100 user scenarios. The result spoke for itself: 98% of regression tests were completed, and the system became stable.

12 Key Factors to Build a Successful Dev Team

Now, let’s consider the 12 main factors explaining what makes a good development team.

1. Clear Project Goals and Product Vision

The team should understand not only its tasks but also the goals of their implementation. This will allow each employee to focus on the right priorities, and, in some cases, even offer better architectural solutions. It will also save you from wasting resources on features that seem non-priority/irrational to most. So, how to implement this in practice? For example, for this, we build a product roadmap, prioritize features according to the RICE model, and organize regular sync sessions with the client.

2. The Right Mix of Skills and Experience

A strong team, as we have already noted above, consists not only of Senior specialists – it is a well-balanced composition of experts capable of making technical decisions, Middle-level specialists who ensure the proper pace of work, and Juniors who perform routine tasks. Such a team is predisposed to scaling without losing the product quality and missing deadlines while maintaining a moderate budget.

3. Strong Technical Leadership

A team lead, an architect, and a CTO are the people who determine how and in what direction the rest of the team will move. Conversely, without seasoned tech leads, the team can quickly face chaos or uncontrolled growth of technical debt. In general, the role of the person responsible for technical leadership is much more than code review – they are also responsible for technical risk management, tech stack selection, as well as the overall team progress and delivery process optimization.

4. Defined Roles and Responsibilities

When there is no understanding of who is responsible for what, conflicts, duplication of actions, and loss of time become irreversible. That is why the roles of each team member must be clear and distinct from the very beginning. For example, the RACI matrix helps us with this – in it, we define the responsibilities of each specialist and agree on expectations.

5. Agile Methodology and Flexibility

A clear plan is a must, but when building it, it is important to take into account that the market and priorities can change. That is why we almost always rely on Agile frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban. They allow us to quickly adapt to changes, collect feedback from end users, and release updates every iteration. The main thing is not just to superficially follow agile practices, but to delve into their essence – that is, to think flexibly and iteratively.

6. Open Communication and Feedback Loops

An effective team is not afraid to discuss even the most difficult things. That is why you have to properly organize communication channels so that some issues can be discussed personally between peers, some – with the product manager, and some reach the client directly. In general, the essence of this approach is not to leave unsaid things and resolve disagreements before they lead to serious conflicts.

7. DevOps and CI/CD Practices

Automation and continuous integration/delivery have become must-haves in software development today. In particular, the implementation of DevOps practices has enabled us to receive rapid feedback, provide reliable releases, and ensure predictable scaling.

8. Culture of Ownership and Accountability

In a strong team, everyone feels responsible for the project. That's why micromanagement can be harmful here. It's much better to give each specialist autonomy in decision-making and an understanding of the impact of their work on business metrics. This approach increases the motivation and development velocity, and, therefore, the quality of the product.

9. Scalable Team Structure

The team structure should be adaptive. While during MVP development the team may consist of only 3-5 people, as the product grows, you will need to ensure splitting by features or domains. That is why it is so crucial to plan core agile team roles in advance and master layer management practices.

10. Productive Tools and Collaboration Stack

Even an experienced team without the right tools risks losing about 30-40% of its efficiency. To avoid this, you should initially prepare a convenient environment for teamwork (for example, Slack and Notion), choose tools for code review and testing (GitHub and Jira), and ensure transparency of processes and task statuses (for instance, in Zoho Projects).

11. Focus on Developer Wellbeing and Retention

Burnout and lack of growth are the main reasons for staff turnover. To eliminate this, you need to take care of maintaining a work-life balance on time and establish clear career tracks. Also, do not forget about regular feedback and reviews, as well as consider opportunities for each team member to advance up the career ladder.

12. Alignment Between Product, Design, and Engineering

When a product and the people working on it are not on the same page, the clients get solutions that do not solve end-users' problems or do so ineffectively. To prevent this from happening, you need to create a single backlog, organize joint planning meetings and discovery sessions, and also devote time to user journey mapping.

How to Scale the Team Over Time

In our experience, scaling a team doesn’t just mean increasing the number of developers. It’s a strategic process where you have to keep the team engaged and flexible at every stage. Here are two simple practices that help us achieve this.

No hiring for the future

One of the most common mistakes of growing teams is hiring several specialists “for the future.” This leads to coordination chaos, when more time is spent not on the product itself, but on synchronization between team members. To avoid this, you should hire new specialists only in case of task overload, confirmed by metrics (for example, time-to-deliver and backlog burn rate). Also, don’t forget about onboarding, but first, try to simply implement DevOps and CI/CD practices – perhaps they will allow the existing composition of your team to cope with the growing volume of work without attracting new experts.

Abstraction from cross-functionality

Although this practice works great in the early stages of a project, when it scales, it can complicate management. So, when the project has moved from the MVP stage to a more mature one, you must divide the areas of responsibility, introduce middle management, and start investing in documentation, knowledge bases, and processes. It is also worth considering communication aspects – that is, maintaining a culture of trust, open discussions, and joint responsibility.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Very often, the project's success is determined by the mistakes that were avoided at the early stages. Let’s consider them briefly below.

Overemphasis on speed

When the priority is to launch a product on the market in a couple of months at any cost, this leads to technical debt and problems with its scaling in the future. Speed is important, but it must be adequate. If you need to speed up, it makes sense to use agile frameworks, short sprints, and regular retrospectives – this will minimize the risk of burnout of specialists and will not allow you to accidentally break the product architecture.

Neglecting soft skills

Even the most technically strong developers will not be useful if they do not know how to competently interact with colleagues and adequately perceive feedback. That’s why empathy, as well as the ability to constructively argue and negotiate, are considered the main competencies that we focus on when hiring new specialists. 

Siloed communication

When frontend, backend, QA, and product management teams work autonomously, this leads to communication delays and a gap between expectations and implementation. This is why we often assemble cross-functional teams (however, with the adjustments described in the previous paragraph), in which each sprint is aligned with the overall goal and is not an isolated event.

Conclusion

Now, you know how to build a software team and, if this concerns the in-house model, you can safely start its staffing and filling the missing vacancies. At the same time, if you consider outsourcing as a more cost-effective and faster option, feel free to contact us. We guarantee a quick selection of specialists in accordance with your business niche and soft skills requirements, so you can be sure that you will get the most out of this partnership.