Here’s why your product needs UX team augmentation

Delivering large scale SaaS projects is hard enough. But in today's market where businesses are losing key personnel due to the high demand for talent, it has become even harder.

To add more to the challenge, you need to make your product not only look great and easy to use, but also easy for your engineering team to build.

Over the last 12 years, I’ve learned that without skilled specialists, even the easiest of projects can derail quickly.

But hiring the right talent is a real challenge at the moment as it takes time and resources to find the perfect fit.

The ramp-up time alone once you find that person could be anywhere between 3-6 months.

Product Designers, in particular, are in high demand and we’ve seen it first-hand as our own need for UX resources has increased.

When it comes to product development, you’d want a product that’s engaging, usable, and also one that provides real value to your customers.

That means you’d need a full product team that includes a Product Owner, UX Designer, and UI Designer as well. That’s three specialist roles.

The one mistake companies make is that they try to get one person to complete multiple jobs because they lack the actual budget to hire so many specialists.

What happens next is that projects get delayed, derailed or just fall over because the quality is just not there.

This is where UX Staff Augmentation comes into play and it’s something we’ve been doing at nuom for the last few years.

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We call ourselves a product team for hire & a studio that fills the gaps in your organization.

We’ve recently provided UX design services for businesses that are struggling to locate Product Designers or just don’t need full time hires.

We’ve provided them with a dedicated UX team which was integrated into their own product team.

We worked as part of that SaaS company’s internal team helping them with the sprint delivery, stand-ups, and internal meetings.

What was the end result you wonder?

They got the boost they wanted to deliver features, generate revenue, and drive growth.

They got to choose when to scale it up and when to turn the tap off.

‍So, how do we start?

The starting point for all of this is the initial Design Roadmap. 

Before we do anything, we always propose running a collaborative remote workshop to align the teams on the priorities concerning design. 

We’ll ultimately build out a “Design Roadmap” - a list of design tasks in priority order. Those can then be looked at separate tasks and figure out where design is best placed to make an impact.

It’s a process that can cut your time to market in half and ensures that you are building the right product for the right customers even if you are low on budget.

In summary, team augmentation allows you to tap into top-notch tech talent and allows you to scale up or down your team without worrying about going through a lengthy, and often expensive, hiring process. 

It also offers you extreme flexibility when it comes to important product decisions, consequently cutting your time to market in half. If you already have an established in-house team, yet still need that extra push to get things done, team augmentation is your next best bet.

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