How building
development team works

Simform’s team extension service allows you to hire pre-vetted, world-class developers as part of your team.

We handle all aspects of finding, vetting, and choosing the right candidates that you don't have the time, focus, desire, or sometimes expertise to do.

Most of our competitors provide TRANSACTIONAL hiring services. You post a gig, they match you up with a developer and you take it from there. We aren't a transactional service.

Best of all, you don’t need to spend hours sifting through online profiles, sorting candidates by hourly rates, and then picking the person you hope can do the job quickly, reliably, and for the right price.

We aren't just adding development capacity to your team. Our value is equally distributed across the entire project execution lifecycle. We take ownership and guarantee the delivery and quality of your project.

We use our proven processes, experience, and engagement models to make sure remote engagement delivers successful results.

This way you get the best of both worlds. You get transparency, access, and skill set you get from working with full-time developers. You also get the benefit of an experienced technology firm who is involved in successfully delivering your project.

None! We operate under the policy that it is our responsibility to find you the right person for the job. If you don’t find the right one, you won’t spend a dime.

Remote teams, whether comprised of developers from 50 miles away from you or 5,000 miles, bring pretty extraordinary advantages.

Knowledge sharing & documentation

The great thing about remote teams is that you are encouraged to keep communications in text format, which also means you will have a written record of all communication. In an office, so much is said casually in passing, and that knowledge is never captured.

You become more disciplined and process driven when working in a remote environment. This is great for any team but sometimes missed in in house teams.

Flexibility
There is no greater sign of trust and respect you can give someone on your team than by offering flexibility with their schedule. They will harness that flexibility to give you incredibly focused hours of work that will be far more productive than office-hours would ever be.

Focus
Offices are great for brainstorming and collaboration, but they cannot give you the focus you need for execution. Working remotely can. Development work requires intense focus and uninterrupted productive time.

Access to great talent around the world

With the world as your hiring pool, you can recruit far more developers and far more talented developers than the leftovers available in your local area. You will also end up with a far more diverse team of people with many different perspectives and approaches to solving challenges.

More opportunity to learn and grow
Without a commute and more time available to them, remote developers are some of the most skilled and up-to-date developers in the world, thanks to the flexibility they have to keep learning and growing.

Timezones can be harnessed for greater productivity
Most people assume that remote development is chaotic because of the differing time zones. This is actually the least of most remote teams’ worries. Time Zones are often utilized wisely so that there is enough overlap for each of the team members to sync up, but also enough difference in time to allow for continuous development to happen as one developer hands off work to another developer.

Most of our developers work remotely and are experienced in working with distributed teams. If an on-site developer is strictly required, we can certainly work with you to make it happen. We can tap into our partner network and a vetted list of developers to help you find a local developer.

We make remote work

We hear frequently from prospective clients that it takes forever to release new features, that users aren't adopting products, and that finished work hasn't met their expectations.

The solution: Communication, lots of it. We build teams with a focus on collaboration, consistent communication, and transparency in working toward a shared goal: a great product.

Constant communication ensures there are absolutely no surprise breaks in execution. We use video calls, daily stand-ups, one-on-one check-ins and (if possible) a once a year “retreat” where everyone can get some face time.

Our fully integrated team is self-managed and operates autonomously

Simform team integrates into your team, participating in standup and scrum meetings, weekly demos, weekly retrospectives.

Daily stand-ups
We do daily stand-ups where everyone gets on a video chat and tells you what they are working on that day and the previous day. When you’ve got people working for you in multiple time zones, this can be challenging. But it is crucial to the success of your team.

The Agile methodology calls for each contributor to go around, talk about what they’ve been working on, what they will be working on, estimate how long it’s going to take them, whether there are any critical blockers that could cause delay, and what their bandwidth looks like. These stand-ups are rigorously tracked by the Tech Lead.

But we do not just rely on unstructured communication. Everyone at Simform uses PPP (progress, plans, problems) methodology which is used at companies like Facebook, Google, eBay, Skype etc. PPP is used to detail progress, issues, thoughts and anything else pertaining to their tasks.

Weekly demonstrations
This one is simple: get everybody on a video chat, share screens, have people show their work, and then talk about it.

If something is exceptional, call it out and appreciate the work. So the team stays motivated.

If something is buggy or substandard, ask why and figure out the solution. This meeting is usually way longer than a stand-up as it is designed to literally “demo” the work that has been promised during stand-ups.

Keep in mind that if there are any “semi-off-topic” follow-up questions then they should be saved for the later Retrospective meeting.

Weekly Retrospectives
A weekly retrospective is where you all collectively review what went well and what could have been improved based on the demo.

We use the lean method of holding a meeting. It is great because it gives everyone a voice—there’s an element of democracy in the development process now. You’re still “the boss” but everybody now has some skin in the game. This will also help to organically create a culture within your remote team—something we will cover at length in a future post.

There’s really no “one-way” to optimize and manage a remote team. Everybody has got their own style and strengths. And your team and processes will evolve as they need to in order to meet the needs of your product and to optimize the time and output of your team.

As a client, you will own all the intellectual property of all paid-for work. We provide an NDA to protect confidentiality. All our team members sign a strict contract to protect your IP.

After all, we are a software company and we use technology to make collaboration work. The whole company is run through several tools, many of them proprietary, to help make fully integrated and self-managed teams operate autonomously.

All top athletes have great coaches and use comprehensive data and analytics to help tune their performance. We believe all top performers can use the same data and analytics to help them get even better.

As a result, we've developed a data-driven productivity app—for how our team works. It effortlessly collects more than 20 data points and provides analytics that enables individuals and teams to use real data on how they work to bring their performance to another level.

In alternative weekly retrospectives meetings, we discuss the developer performance dashboard. This has all the information about the overall status of your project, key milestone dates, sprint plans, productivity of developers, velocity of developers, story points worked on developers, complex tasks worked by developers etc.

We know that if client’s project launches smoothly, they’ll come back for more. We're willing to over-invest in guaranteeing results, rather than under-invest to make our financial reports look pretty in the short-run.

We offer a risk-free trial period of up to two weeks. You will only have to pay if you are happy with the development team and wish to continue.

This is a good way to ensure that the freelance developer is a good fit. If you don’t find them to be extraordinary, you will not be charged and to make sure your time isn't wasted we will assign someone to guarantee the work is done for free.

Simform maintains a variety of insurance to protect and satisfy company-level obligations for our enterprise partners.

With other platforms client’s IP and their security isn't as safe. And reliability, responsibility, and long term commitment of freelancers are questionable.