Often, insecurity sets in when outsourcing product development to a 3rd party development company. If done right, the partnership will be very rewarding and will help you release quality products to market faster. In this post, I have covered 6 simple ways by which product outsourcing can be made successful.

1. Leverage an in-house architect who has control in specifying the roadmap for your product development. Doing so will help you clear the requirements, build the specification, determine what technology to use, and scope the architecture so that it can be safely outsourced
2. Outsource development while keeping product definition, systems architecture and quality assurance in-house
3. Keep it agile as this will allow the outsourcing organization to continue managing the requirements and have the flexibility to change the requirements when needed. The critical success factor here will be whether the development team is able to deliver what it is committing for every iteration
4. Set expectations upfront and have timely communication. It’s also important to ensure availability to communicate. This will help the project run smoothly and make necessary adjustments
5. Define measurable project deliverables so that performance and quality can be monitored
6. Share your product roadmap, customer inputs and customer successes with the provider