Consulting
A team, not a pool
of interchangeable hours
You get a named squad of engineers, a tech lead and a QA specialist who stay on your product long enough to hold opinions about it. They work in your tools, your sprints and your definition of done, and they are measured on your delivery rather than our utilisation.
Overview
A standing squad with its own lead, its own metrics and a memory of your codebase.
The economics of most outsourcing arrangements quietly reward rotation. People move between accounts, context is rebuilt every quarter, and the client pays for the same onboarding four separate times. We staff dedicated teams the other way round: the same engineers stay for the length of the engagement, and when someone does leave, we absorb the overlap cost rather than billing you for it.
A standard squad is five to nine people: a tech lead, three to six engineers, a QA engineer, and fractional design or platform support where the work needs it. They join your standups, your repository and, if the work demands it, your on-call rota. Requirements come from your product owner directly, not filtered through an account manager writing summaries.
We publish cycle time, escaped defect rate and deployment frequency every month, taken from your own tooling, whether the numbers flatter us or not. Full throughput on a codebase of moderate complexity takes three to five weeks, and we put that curve in the proposal instead of implying that a newly formed team is productive from its first day.
- 23 days
- Average from contract signature to first merged pull request in production
- 94%
- Engineer retention on client accounts over a rolling twelve months
- 4.1 days
- Median cycle time from ticket start to production across active squads
Capabilities
What this covers
Six areas we staff properly. If your problem sits outside them, the honest note at the foot of this page says so.
Squad composition and staffing
Team shape designed around your actual gaps rather than a standard template, with seniority mix, allocation percentage and cost per role visible in the proposal before you commit to anything.
Structured ramp-up
A six-week onboarding plan with weekly throughput expectations, starting on real but low-risk tickets, so you can see progress against a stated curve instead of guessing whether it is going well.
Working inside your process
Your Jira or Linear, your branching model, your review standards and your release calendar. We adapt to how you already work, and only propose changes once we have earned the standing to argue for them.
Delivery metrics in the open
Cycle time, throughput, escaped defects and deployment frequency reported monthly from your own tooling, with the causes of any regression discussed rather than presented as a rounded traffic light.
Scaling in both directions
Adding or removing engineers on thirty days' notice within an agreed band, so a slower quarter does not force you into a renegotiation or a contract you have to break awkwardly.
Continuity and knowledge retention
Decision records written as work happens, paired ownership of every critical area, and a two-week overlap at our cost whenever an engineer rotates off the account for any reason.
Deliverables
What you get
- Named team with CVs, seniority mix and confirmed allocation percentages per person
- Six-week ramp-up plan with stated weekly throughput expectations
- Monthly delivery report: cycle time, escaped defects and deployment frequency
- Architecture decision records and documentation written into your repository as work proceeds
- Replacement commitment with a two-week handover overlap paid for by us
- Quarterly engagement review covering scope, staffing levels and commercial terms
Stack
What we build it with
- GitHub
- GitLab CI
- Jira
- Linear
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Terraform
- Datadog
- SonarQube
- Figma
- Slack
- Playwright
Process
How the engagement runs
Two-week increments against a written definition of done. You can stop at any increment boundary and keep everything built so far.
Scope and team design
We map the roadmap to the skills it needs, then propose the smallest squad that can deliver it, with the reasoning for each role written down.
You interview, you decide
Every proposed engineer is interviewed by your team. We do not place anyone you have not met, and rejecting a candidate carries no commercial penalty.
Ramp-up sprints
Two to three sprints on real work of contained risk, pairing with your engineers, while the team builds context on the domain and the deployment path.
Steady-state delivery
The squad runs at full throughput inside your process, with the tech lead handling estimation, technical risk and anything that would otherwise land on your manager.
Quarterly review
Metrics, staffing and rate reviewed together every quarter, with the option to grow, shrink or end the engagement on thirty days' notice.
When this is the wrong engagement
For a clearly defined piece of work with a fixed end date, a fixed-scope project is cheaper and simpler to manage, since dedicated teams only pay off when the roadmap is open-ended and continuity matters more than a fixed price.
FAQ
Questions we get asked
- Can we interview the engineers before they join?
Yes, and we insist on it. Every proposed engineer goes through your interview process, and you can decline anyone without explanation or commercial consequence. A team you did not select is a team your leads will second-guess for the whole engagement.
- What timezone overlap do we get?
A minimum of four hours' overlap with your working day as standard, extendable to six or seven where the work needs close collaboration. Squads with heavy on-call or incident duties are staffed to your hours rather than ours, priced accordingly and stated in the contract.
- What happens if an engineer is not working out?
Tell the tech lead, or tell us directly. We replace within three weeks with a two-week handover overlap that we pay for. There is no notice period on an individual replacement and no argument about it. This has happened on roughly one engagement in six.
- Who owns the intellectual property?
You do, assigned on creation, covering code, documentation, designs and infrastructure definitions. Our engineers work under assignment clauses that pass rights through to you directly. We keep no residual licence and reuse nothing from your codebase on other accounts.
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