The development industry, the industry we’ve been a part for a decade now, is broken.
Companies are adopting agile, but in the constraints of fixed-bid contracts.
Developers are getting paid based on where they live, rather than the value they bring to a team and what challenges they can solve.
More startups are being born every day, and they can’t scale fast enough because our industry consists of agencies with limited team sizes.
And despite it being great that technology is moving faster than ever, it’s resulted in a massive shortage in developers with the most current skillsets.
Our industry is now stuck in an era that was designed to build finite projects that require easily accessible skills.
But the era we operate in now allows for companies to go from $0 to multi-billion-dollar valuations in only 36 months.
The era we operate in today has new, powerful and innovative frameworks popping up every month.
And the era we operate in today is one where people can more easily than ever live anywhere in the world. If only our industry helped support them in doing so.
And the only companies that have tried to bring forth solutions have ended up only hurting the industry’s reputation more by being unable to deliver quality.
For the past five years, we’ve shifted toward building a model and a culture that is designed to help companies be truly agile, scale with their needs, and solve any specialized challenge that comes their way.
And today, we are announcing that this is now the sole focus of X-Team International moving forward: to provide companies with developers they can trust, whenever they need them.
Sounds a bit too good to be true, right?
Well, here’s how we’ve already been proving it’s the right solution:
We spent a decade building a network of the most extraordinary developers from across the globe. We did it by diving into core, niche communities to meet and inspire people who are the best at what they do.
We then worked with our partners, like RIOT Games or 20th Century FOX, as they had new challenges and product ideas arise. We were able to, within a matter of days, bring them a team of exactly the right developers with the specialized skillsets needed to solve those challenges.
And rather than treat our engagements like projects, we instead offered those developers as dedicated, full-time resources. This allowed them to actually operate an agile-based approach, without constraints, and without an endless stream of change requests and meetings slowing down progress.
When you’ve augmented your team with focused, dedicated superheroes, productivity is inevitable.
The result?
Here’s a taste: AmericanIdol.com was completely re-designed and launched an entire month before the show premiered (a first in 9 years).
We’ve now implemented this model with remarkable startups up to massive enterprises and have been amazed at how quickly it solves their challenges and helps them work in a more agile, fast-paced fashion.
The most exciting result is that we’ve also now dedicated the vision of our company to solving our industry’s inability to support developers who want to live freely anywhere in the world.
Our vision now is to provide extraordinary developers with incredible opportunities regardless of where they live, and ensure they get paid based on their value rather than their location.
This really wouldn’t work without an incredible remote culture, which is why we’ve spent the last five years cultivating and refining our culture to ensure all of our partners get to work with superhero developers who have a selfless, #sleepcanwait attitude, and a dedication to quality and execution.
It’s been great seeing all of our partners understand that value really is about someone’s ability to solve challenges and deliver world-class quality and communication.
As we launched a new x-team.com this week, it was inspiring to sit back and realize we’d built it with a team from Brazil, USA, Romania, South Korea, and India. It’s comforting to know that the site that our vision lives and breathes on was built with global equality at its core.
The development industry doesn’t have to be broken. We simply need to make the effort to change how we work and provide companies with a solution that suits their needs and the speed at which change happens today.
X-Team is the beginning of that solution, and we can’t wait to see what the future brings.