Hiring a mobile development contractor can help address a lack of in-house expertise, allow a company to leverage specialized skills, and help manage resource needs and costs. When choosing a contractor, companies should request references, conduct technical interviews and test projects, and focus on communication and process. Establishing clear expectations, payment terms, and oversight helps reduce risks when outsourcing mobile development work. Outstaffing individual specialists can also help address urgent project needs.

1. How to choose a mobile development
contractor?
Dmitry Peterson
dmitry.peterson@simbirsoft.com

2. About me
● SimbirSoft's Deputy CEO for innovations,
Head of mobile development department. 14
years of IT business experience. The founder
of SimbirSoft's mobile development segment
(active since 2011). 45 mobile projects were
implemented under my leadership.

3. SimbirSoft brand history
● mobile.SimbirSoft belongs to SimbirSoft Group
○ Since 2011.
○ More than 70 projects
○ Clients from the USA, Europe and Russia
● SimbirSoft Group is on the software development market
since 2001 currently employing more than 300 specialists.

4. Peak load of mobile projects
● Up to 10 000 man-hours

5. What I am going to speak about
● We act as contractors for mobile app development projects
● We also act as an acquirer and possess the experience of
contractor management
● I will share the experience of hiring a proper
contractor/partner/agency

6. The reasons and purposes of hiring
a contractor
● Lack of expertise in a certain sphere
● Specific expertise
○ Speech/image recognition
○ Augmented reality
● Focused companies

7. The reasons and purposes of hiring
a contractor
● Reinforcement of the existing team to meet the deadlines of
the project
○ Resource management: «plugging the holes»
○ Seasonality management
● The deadline was yesterday
● «Urgent decisions»
● Optimization of costs, partnership conditions, etc.

8. Who are the contractors
● Consider mostly B2B interaction
○ (companies focused on mobile development,
outsourcers)
● Freelance designers
● Indie teams

9. Algorithm of choosing
● Request references
● Technical interview
● Obligatory requirements for working with our processes and
infrastructure
● Test project for 2-3 days
● Continue cooperation if everything is OK. Search for another
one if you failed to establish cooperation.

10. The ways of getting benefits from
outsourcing
● High quality and productivity of project implementation
involving an outsourcer is mostly determined by the process
● Process sourcing results in inevitable expenses

11. Process
● Search
● Selection
● Testing
● Maintaining the database of outsourcers (strong points,
resource availability, prices, log of cooperation history)
● Retention of trusted contractors

12. Retention of contractors
● Selection process is expensive
● A good contractor expects to get a certain volume of orders
from you
● Balance question
○ Your workload — Their expectations

13. Designers
● There is a designer on the staff
● There are 20 trusted designers
○ Each one has his/her own style
■ «bright design»
■ strict design

14. Requirements on designers
● Working in TZ of the acquirer
● Obligatory live communication with the team and the client

15. How to choose a designer
● Portfolio
● Evaluation of communication skills
● Provide a test case (a familiar design) with vague
requirements
● Specialization

16. Stop signs
● Does not communicate during collection of requirements
● Sent a complete project in a week with no comments
● The project turned out to be good but the designer doesn't
resist trolling

17. Features of a good designer
● Gathers the detailed information on the forthcoming project
and may even refuse to do the job providing solid arguments.
Knows his/her strong points well.
● The first result is usually a number of various layouts.
● Provides solid arguments to prove his/her point of view about
preferences of target audience
● Follows the trends

18. Recommendations
● Set small turnkey iterations and minimize financial losses
● Post-pay
● Working in your infrastructure
● Search for Indian companies with foreign offices
● Request references with real names and phone numbers
● Consider time zones and Indian English peculiarities

19. Avoid outsourcing of
● Project leads
● Testers

20. Evolution of working with a
contractor
● Test project
● Outstaffing/outsourcing
● Agency agreement

21. How to reduce risks if you are
already working
● Creating the plan of your cooperation make sure that you will get the
first significant results as soon as possible
● No prepayment
● Everyday video conferences or working in our office
● QA on our side
● Common information field and infrastructure
● Set the deadlines keeping in mind that urgent improvements may be
required
● Current sources, design and code should be always accessible
● Security and clean license review should be done during the
acceptance

22. Outstaffing
● It will be better to choose from the list of trusted companies
with successful experience of previous cooperation.
● Give preference to the most sociable specialist
● Explain the rules before the game starts:
○ Task evaluation before implementation
○ Find out everything before the beginning of cooperation
○ …..

23. Case
● Two weeks before presentation to the investors
○ «Something» has been done already, we have to make it
work properly
● Urgent creation of a breakthrough team
● Working at nights, on weekends and holidays
● Demo app is created

24. Thanks for watching!
dmitry.peterson@simbirsoft.com
linkedin.com/in/DmitryPeterson