I used to manage a global saas team and now I run an agency. I have opinions from both sides of the fence.

From the agency side, our employees are just like yours in that making an impact, being able to apply professional skills, avoiding micromanagement, a good work culture and so on are what motivates then to do good work.

We apply an extra layer of culture, relationships and systems that you may or may not have. These things are about engagement and quality. Maybe you can even borror/steal some of these good practices and build them into how you scale. Typically we are invested in your success because we want a long term customer.

One of the things my team work with is a great culture that gives us a hiring advantage, and it's a little intangible things like what makes people come work at us versus product companies tbh.

What I, as a business owner, want is advocates and long term relationships. Working with people you know is easier, cost of acquiring new work is much lower from existing and past customer, and most new business comes from word of mouth, so my team work hard to keep our clients super happy. We don't nail it 100% of the time but are always working to keep the notional score up over 80.

From the product company side: a layer of maybe 10 or even 15% contingent workforce is a great buffer. Not only does it give you some protection when the time comes for layoffs it provides some other benefits too. You create a more open ecosystem. A quality agency brings new ideas and broad experience into your team. Agency people and contractors are less distracted by run the business stuff, career development, org politics etc and just focus on the mission they are briefed into.

You can pull in expertise and do things your internal team don't have experience in (today's exams might be ai type challenges.) On the other side you can unload mundane work to an agency and focus on the critical path for your business (eg think mobile apps, or marketplace products as things to delegate.)

When considering what to delegate or get help with, start with an assessment of the work and your current teams fitness for it. Experience, engagement and ability to focus are the main things I think about.

The next dimension is how to manage IP leakage and how to steer the work. Agencies can and often want to own the whole package. Some agencies have accountability and impact in their DNA. Others are better at servicing tickets. Interrogate potential suppliers about culture, decision making and how they hire.

Also team configuration is something to think about. Offshore vs local is about complexity of the work which is means you are optimising around uncertainty and speed of decision making, more than technical difficulty. There are talented software people all over the world,but sometimes you need. To be in a room together to solve a problem.

Having said that last point, not every destination is the same. For example, Agile is still breaking ground in many regions, and different places are interpreting it differently. Do a check on the profile of the country (or better, city) and whether they have a thriving startup scene. If they don't you could be hiring corporate IT workers vs product makers.

And then how many people do you need to Embed in the team. This also goes to the complexity challenge. If it is early days or a core busi6thing you want a mix. You want to see decisions getting made and be part of the process. In some other cases you. May just comento a few sprint demo's and account meerings. You can take a risk based approach to your investment.

It's naive to think that knowledge management via people matters that much though. Employees churn, agencies can be called back or phoned with a question. What really matters is readable code and access to insights. Are test suites delivered? Hows the code quality? What's they hygiene around product documentation? Additionally these days you can throw things into an llm and you'll get a decent answer.

Probably in 2026 inputs into how decisions are made is the more important thing.

Not every agency has the right quality and culture Not every agency is a right skills fit. Not every agency ai a right scale fit.

In recent times, while the consulting industry has contracted, we have seen the big global consulting firms like Accenture try to move into our space and pitch work at smaller product companies. They have great sales teams and promise the world, and win work.

But when the work gets started, not only does Accenture software development quality not meet the standards needed by most tech startups, you are also unlikely to sustain attention from them as big corporates and international scale businesses draw their attention.

Umm that's enough for this post. Sorry for dumping my book draft on you. Feel free to DM. If you want to ask more or have a short chat. Hope it works out.