Product design is an intricate process requiring expert eyes on the entire procedure. But sometimes, your product team simply can’t handle the pressure and responsibilities of designing a product idea, which is fine.
This is where you should consider outsourcing product design to a third-party vendor. Let’s dive deep into everything about product design outsourcing today.
When Should You Outsource Your Product Design?
These are the top 5 scenarios where you should consider product design outsourcing.
1. When Your Team Doesn’t Have Enough Internal Resources
Let’s start by considering the team’s capabilities. Coming up with an idea is one thing, but turning that idea into a viable product is a different ball game.
The skills your team must have to go through the process include the following:
- Prototyping
- Deep Scan
- Documentation
- Testing
If the team lacks expertise even in one of these fields, you will need to fill in the gaps with outsourcing.
2. You Have Very Little Time To Complete Your Design
Even when your in-house design team is full of experts, you may have to work with a very strict deadline to complete and serve the product to your target audience or a client you’re preparing the product for.
But even the best professionals cannot deal with a too strict deadline while delivering high-quality products. That is when you can leverage outsourcing to access additional product developers who can complete the task easily.
3. Your Business Is Not Design-Centric
If you want to design professional software, you must have a solid knowledge base that you achieve by frequently working on design projects. If your business is not design-centric, it can be a logical choice to bring in external experts to do the design work for you.
4. The Product You’re Launching Has Higher Market Barriers
Some industries have very high standards for new products that want to enter the target market, which can be considered market barriers. Some barriers are simply too high than others, making you go in circles to fulfill regulations that can help you enter the market easily.
Design outsourcing can help you make your product look and feel high-end to fulfill the quota for reaching your target audience.
5. You Need A Unique Perspective
Let’s say you have an expert team who can efficiently reach deadlines with their current skillset level. Even then, there are some times when you just need a new angle. The best way to access that unique perspective is to bring in a team of design experts.
Benefits of Outsourcing Product Design
1. You Get Access To A Wider Talent Pool
This is the most obvious advantage of product development outsourcing, regardless of the sector you are hiring for. When you tap into the outsourcing market, you get access to a huge array of professionals you wouldn’t be able to hire locally.
These people are brighter, far more experienced, and can offer better results while maintaining professionalism and transparency.
2. You Save A Lot of Resources
Hiring a regular employee can and will cost you a lot of resources in terms of additional costs for facilitating the employee you are onboarding.
When you take the help of outsourcing, all you have to do is mutually sign the working contract agreeing on your preferred price model, and you’re done! No more wasted time on boring interviews and meetings, and no extra money lost on the hiring process.
3. You Can Work With More Flexibility
When you outsource an entire team for product design, you can upscale or downscale the team according to your needs for the project they are working on. The team members also receive individual flexibility to apply unique solutions for the designing process.
4. The Price-To-Quality Ratio Is Optimal
Product design and development specialists often come in with the demand of a hefty paycheck, and even then, the work is not up to your expectations. With that, it can cost you even more money for design resources that the specialist requires.
In the case of outsourcing, you pay for exactly what you are getting.
5. You Get To Do More With Less
With the product design outsourcing process, you are recruiting a team who can do more than just design your product. They can steer your development in the right direction with additional expertise and affordable development cost.
The result of this entire process is to get additional advanced insights for the affordable cost of product design. The developers are always doing their best to make the most of your project specifications.
6. You Don’t Have To Micro-Manage The Entire Thing
When you hand over the development process to a specialized organization, you don’t have to micro-manage every instance of product development. The specialized team has a project manager who oversees the project until it’s completed while you focus on other core business activities.
The team is also full of people who know exactly what they are doing, and leaving them to their element can only improve the final result of the product design.
7. Your Time To Market The Product Lowers Significantly
When you’re working with a dedicated team from the outside, the team focuses only on the project you assigned to them. A dedicated team can create a successful and functional prototype within a couple of weeks, while doing it yourself can take over a year. Also, an external team has a higher product development success rate, which is perfectly suitable for any business model.
8. It Opens Up Possibilities For New Ideas
Product design outsourcing gets you access to a world full of professionals and their unique perspectives and ideas. You can use these ideas to improve the design of your current product, or you can work on a brand-new design for a different product entirely.
9. Easier Team Scalability
Outsourcing allows you easier scalability, but most of the time, you don’t even need to worry about the scalability of your product. The vendor you are in a contract with will analyze the scalability of the product and will continue to scale your product accordingly.
10. You Can Leverage The Network of Your Outsourced Product Design Team
Every team member of an outsourced product design team comes in with their fair share of connections with other experienced individuals. You can leverage these connections to gain more insights or find more potential suitable experts to add to your team for future projects.
Common Challenges of Outsourcing Product Design
Your Product Design Data Is Prone To Security Risks
Whenever you are handing your product design over to a third-party product development partner, you risk revealing private company information in front of unknown people, which can also get leaked in the case of a cyber-attack.
The Outsourced Team Doesn’t Know The Customers
The product owner always directly connects to the customers and envisions the product and customer expectations. Though the product owner can convey the user stories to the outsourced design team, the team will still not have enough insights to accurately resonate with the customers with their design compared to an in-house team.
There May Be A Communication Gap With The Internal Team
Though an outsourced design team receives detailed instructions for the design, not everything is always written down. Sometimes the internal team may discuss design aspects over a coffee while having a casual conversation and gossip.
Since the team isn’t present, they are sure to miss out on these small details, and the subtle changes can be seen in the product design.
The Objectives Are Not Entirely Clear
There are times when the product owners don’t have a clear image regarding the complete product in their mind, and they don’t have any roadmap planned either. This is a common scenario, but it can become a challenge regarding product design.
When the product owner themselves are not sure of the right vision, the team may not get the proper specifications of product design, and the final design can be delayed due to this.
The Project Consistency Can Be At Risk
When you’re working with an outsider team, it’s very easy to skip over different important details, and sometimes the instructions can get lost in translation. The fluctuations in instructions can cause project consistency to be at great risk.
Best Agency to Outsource Product Design or Web Design
Impala Intech is the best software development agency to outsource your product design requirement. Well, my answer may as well be biased but our team checks out all the criteria of what the best product design outsourcing company should do.
For instance, we don’t charge cutthroat prices, maintain maximum quality and precisely develop the product in an optimized way based on your feedback.
To Wrap It All Up
Product design can be critical, and it’s not surprising if the internal team fails to develop a unique design idea. But when you outsource product design, you get more benefits than you initially bargained for.
FAQs
Yes, outsourcing product design can often land the project in the hands of professionals that can finish the project compared to a traditional in-house designer team.
Hiring, training, and maintaining an in-house designer time can get highly expensive. With an outsourced product design team, you only pay for the required work while your vendor takes care of the rest.
Sometimes, the project vision isn’t consistent with the design that the product team is producing, but most of the time, the product is high-quality.
Yes, because an outsourced team is usually dedicated to one project at a time, they concentrate on your product and complete it faster. In turn, it reduces the time to market your product.
It is completely possible, and most of the time, the vendors take care of the design scalability.
