One of the reasons why lots of businesses fail is hiring the wrong people. Employees are the engine of your business, so you need to get the right fuel to keep everything going smoothly. Hiring the right people for your product development tech team can make or break your business, so make sure you avoid the following common mistakes.

Not identifying the right technology stack for the product

A technology stack is a combination of frameworks, programming languages and software products for creating web and mobile apps. The main components of a tech stack are client side (front-end) and server side (back-end).

Choosing the right tech stack will determine how your product works and scales over time. To make the right decision, you need to consider the type of your project, your time to market, scalability, maintainability and the overall cost of development. Professional software developers can help you make the right choice, especially if you’re not tech-savvy.

Tech team not having experience building user-centered products

Relying on a user-centered design approach when building your products will lead to your users actually being satisfied with your offerings. To build user-centered products, you need to understand your users: who they are, what they will use your products for and in what situations.

Only when you know their goals and expectations regarding your products can you create solutions that solve their pain points and lead to excellent user experiences. Therefore, make sure you find tech professionals who know their way around building user-centered products and provide them with the necessary customer information to help them create products your users will love.

Not understanding whether the hired team follows best development practices or not

Hiring a tech team before gathering enough information about which development practices every team member follows can result in a low-velocity team that spends most of the time fixing bugs. You need to build a tech team with high velocity and minimal regression.

Therefore, make sure that your hired developers always build your products from the core out, that they branch every piece of work in order for potential regressions to be easily identified and fixed, that they always apply automated testing and that they always perform consistent code reviews.

Compromising on tech team’s quality over cost

Don’t let costs influence your decision, because then you may end up with poor-quality products. If you need, let’s say, 5 developers for your project, don’t hire 4 simply because you’ll reduce your costs. Every new project requires a bit of an investment but, if you focus only on quality when building your tech team, all the investments and efforts will pay off in the long run.

Not understanding the roles within the tech team and project team structure

Apart from understanding your project team structure in order to make the best hires who’ll know how to lead and motivate, you need to understand all the roles within your tech team if you are to hire the right people for those roles.

Your technology team must have software developers, software designers, software engineers, QA (quality assurance) engineers, software testers and a project manager. Depending on the type of your project, you can also hire software architects, business analysts, and a product manager.

Searching only for local development team whereas great talent is available remotely

A lot of businesses make this mistake when hiring a tech team, when it shouldn’t even be an issue. Why limit your selection to local developers only when there’s a huge talent pool all over the world?

You may find experts locally, which would be amazing, but you never know what talent you can work with if you don’t expand your horizons and look further. Your top priority is building high-quality products, so focus on finding people who can help you realize your vision, no matter where they are located.

Not verifying credentials

Verifying the credentials of your tech team candidates is a crucial step for making the right hires. You need to make sure that the candidates have the right experience and expertise in order to ensure that they will truly contribute to your organization and build excellent products.

Check how many apps they’ve already built and how they actually work, how much time did it take for them to deliver the final product, and how satisfied their users were with the apps. Check this with their previous clients and don’t forget to sift through customer reviews as well.

Not testing the candidates for technical expertise

You should run your candidates through technical review tests, or pair testing, so that you can narrow down the list and hire the best possible tech experts for your project. This is a very important part of the hiring process, because you put two people together to test the same feature at the same time, which gives you a clear insight into who’s better at their job.

Hiring too quickly

You may have heard of the saying “slow to hire and quick to fire”, but that’s the worst possible advice someone can give you. It’s the saying that grew strong for a while out of fear of failure and bad decisions.

Time may be of the essence sometimes but moving too quickly often leads to bad decisions. If you’re eager to hire a tech team too quickly, you may end up dealing with bad hires and, consequently, wasted time and money. Instead, take your time to be sure you make the right hires.

Hiring teams who don’t understand your business

If your teams don’t understand your business, they’ll ultimately build products that don’t provide real value to your customers. That’s why you must ensure that they fully understand your vision, your key goals and objectives, your industry and niche, and your target audience. That’s the only way they’ll craft products that will help you achieve your goals and satisfy your customers.

Avoid making these mistakes when hiring a tech team for product development and you’ll be on the right path to building high-quality products that your customers will love and that will bring you a high ROI.