Hiring an offshore development team: a practical checklist

Working with a development team in another country lets you reach skills and capacity you may not find locally. It also adds distance, time zones and different working habits to your project. Most of the risks are well known and easy to manage if you plan for them. This checklist covers what to settle before you hire an offshore team, whether for a website, an app or ongoing development work.

What do you need to define before you start looking?

A clear brief makes it easier to compare teams and harder for misunderstandings to grow. Before you contact anyone, write down:

• The goal: what the project must achieve for your business, not just the features.
• The first version: the features that must be in the first release, and those that can wait.
• Constraints: platforms, existing systems, hosting, languages and any rules your industry follows.
• Who decides: the person on your side who approves designs, answers questions and accepts the work.
• What you already have: designs, content, code, accounts and documentation.

Which engagement model suits your project?

Offshore teams usually work in one of three ways:

• Fixed scope: an agreed scope, timeline and fee. Good for well-defined projects such as a website or the first version of an app. Changes are handled through change requests.
• Time and materials: you pay for the time spent. Good when the scope is likely to change, for example ongoing improvements to a product.
• Dedicated team: one or more people work only on your product for an agreed period, and you direct the work day to day.

Whichever model you choose, ask for a written proposal that lists the scope, milestones, assumptions and what is not included.

How do you check that a team is the right one?

Look for evidence, not promises:

• live websites and apps they built that you can use yourself, and case studies that explain their part in the work;
• references from clients in your country or industry that you can speak to;
• the company's registration details, which you can usually check in the official company register of its country;
• who exactly will work on your project, and how much experience they have with your platform;
• how they test, how they review code and how they report progress.

A small paid first piece of work, such as a discovery workshop, a prototype or a single feature, is a good way to see how a team communicates and delivers before you commit to a larger project.

How do you work well across time zones?

Time zones can work in your favour: work can continue while your office is closed. They need structure, though:

• agree a few hours of overlap each working day for calls and quick questions;
• use one shared place for tasks and decisions, such as a project board, rather than scattered emails and chats;
• hold a short regular check-in and a demo of finished work at the end of each sprint or milestone;
• write decisions down, so nothing depends on remembering a call;
• check public holidays in both countries when you plan milestones.

What should the contract cover?

Read the contract carefully, and ask a lawyer in your own country to review it if the project is significant. Make sure it covers:

• Ownership: who owns the code, designs and content, and when ownership passes to you;
• Confidentiality: a non-disclosure agreement, signed before you share sensitive details;
• Personal data: how the team may access and handle personal data, in line with the privacy laws that apply to your business, including rules on transferring data to other countries;
• Payment milestones: what is delivered and accepted before each payment;
• Warranty and support: how bugs found after launch are handled, and for how long;
• Termination: what happens to the work, the code and your data if either side ends the contract.

As an example of how ownership can be set out: at Dzimark, when all invoices for a project are paid in full, the client owns the final deliverables we created specifically for them: designs, content and custom code.

How do you keep your code, accounts and data safe?

The safest rule is simple: your business owns the accounts, and the team gets access to them. In practice:

• keep the code in a repository owned by your organisation, such as GitHub or GitLab, and add the team as members;
• register domains, hosting, app store developer accounts and cloud services in your company's name;
• give each person their own login with only the access they need, and turn on two-factor authentication;
• never share passwords by email or chat; use a password manager with shared vaults;
• use test data rather than real customer data during development wherever possible;
• remove access promptly when someone leaves the project.

How do you protect quality?

Agree the definition of "done" before the work starts: tested on which devices and browsers, reviewed by whom, documented where. Ask for a staging environment where you can try every change before it goes live. Review progress at every milestone rather than at the end, so problems are found while they are still small. Insist on documentation that another developer could follow.

What is your exit plan?

Plan the end of the relationship at the beginning. You should be able to move the project to another team, or in-house, without starting again. That means up-to-date code in your repository, documentation of how to build and deploy it, a list of all third-party services and their logins, and a handover meeting. A team that is confident in its work will be happy to agree to this.

If you are considering an offshore partner for a website, app or AI project, learn about Dzimark and our website development service, or send us your brief and we will reply with questions and a written proposal.