What is a Plug-in Tech Team?

We plug our team into your business, providing expertise across the spectrum of product development – from strategy to code – to deliver your product.

We work with you to identify your goals, design the best solution for you, execute this, and then measure the impact and feed back into your business strategy. We provide technical leadership as well as hands on expertise and will help you navigate big picture concerns like operational efficiency, security, compliance and investor readiness.

We can hand over projects to an in-house team (which we can help you build) or continue to run alongside you – whatever you decide is best.

Rather than ‘developers for hire’ consider us your fully outsourced, self-managing tech department ready to help you plan, design, build, test and launch your product – ensuring it remains aligned with your vision.

What You Can Expect:

  • A deep understanding of your business and your vision
  • Taking your product from idea through design, build and test to launch
  • Keeping focus on the big picture whilst nailing the fine detail
  • A team of experts deployed as appropriate across the project
  • A team that can scale levels of support up or down to meet your need
  • Clarity on costs and deliverables before any work begins

Our Plug-in Tech Team Includes

Tech Strategy

We’ll audit your product and team to understand your business vision, challenges, and resources. From this, we create a Product Roadmap, an evolving strategy that guides product evolution and technical considerations, ensuring alignment with business goals. After each launch, we measure impact and gather feedback to update the Roadmap.

  • Tech Strategy

    We’ll audit your product and team to understand your business vision, challenges, and resources. From this, we create a Product Roadmap, an evolving strategy that guides product evolution and technical considerations, ensuring alignment with business goals. After each launch, we measure impact and gather feedback to update the Roadmap.

Solution Design

Building on the Tech Strategy we’ll design a solution with you, focusing on the most impactful tech that gets the job done and can scale up alongside business growth as user needs evolve. All of this will be written up in a specification document which includes fixed prices. We’ll also provide an Improvement Scorecard to measure the project’s impact.

  • Solution Design

    Building on the Tech Strategy we’ll design a solution with you, focusing on the most impactful tech that gets the job done and can scale up alongside business growth as user needs evolve. All of this will be written up in a specification document which includes fixed prices. We’ll also provide an Improvement Scorecard to measure the project’s impact.

Software Development

Software development follows the specification, with frequent demonstrations of progress and opportunities to provide feedback. This includes DevOps for code management, and testing and infrastructure setup. Testing is carried out in three stages. Developer testing/peer review, systematic testing in a test environment and finally pre-launch user testing.

  • Software Development

    Software development follows the specification, with frequent demonstrations of progress and opportunities to provide feedback. This includes DevOps for code management, and testing and infrastructure setup. Testing is carried out in three stages. Developer testing/peer review, systematic testing in a test environment and finally pre-launch user testing.

Best Practice

Every project we deliver prioritises ease of use, scalability, and security. We ensure compliance with OWASP, DRY and peer review best practices without over or under engineering your product. For example, we’d apply enhanced security and information governance to a system handling clinical data, but not to one collecting only usernames and emails.

  • Best Practice

    Every project we deliver prioritises ease of use, scalability, and security. We ensure compliance with OWASP, DRY and peer review best practices without over or under engineering your product. For example, we’d apply enhanced security and information governance to a system handling clinical data, but not to one collecting only usernames and emails.

How it Works

  1. North Star Workshop

    Getting a deep understanding of your vision, business and challenges

    • More Info

      The North Star Workshop creates a shared vision between you and us, avoiding common project pitfalls caused by misaligned expectations. Clients find it helps them discover new perspectives, risks, and opportunities, and unify their team’s vision.

  2. Planning

    Creating and documenting an appropriate solution

    • More Info

      We create a detailed specification (with wireframes) based on the North Star Workshop. We keep revising this until you’re completely satisfied. We also create a roadmap to show how projects connect to add compounding value.

  3. Development

    Delivering the specification - the ‘actual work’

    • More Info

      Upon specification approval, your dedicated team begins development, providing regular progress demos and feedback opportunities. You’ll have direct access to your project manager and the tech team. Testing happens at each milestone, and full end-to-end testing happens before your final review.

  4. Measure and Repeat

    Measure the impact, update the plan, take the next step

    • More Info

      We track key metrics with an Improvement Scorecard, using feedback and business goals to plan next steps. Our cyclical “plan > build > measure > learn” approach gives you significantly more control over costs and deliverables than Agile approaches.

Ready to talk about your product?

Book a Free Discovery Call

500+
Total Products Built
250k+
Users Supported
20
Years Running
300+
Clients Worked With
200+
Combined years of experience

The Benefits of Plug-in Tech Team

Our Plug-In Tech team accelerates product development. We help you clarify what you want to achieve, work out the best way to achieve it, and then execute this plan. We’ll work in close partnership to design the right solution – but we manage key processes like project planning, code reviews and testing so that you can focus on growing your business instead of trying to manage a tech team.

The service is about making rapid, iterative improvements. To start, we identify and make the smallest changes that result in the largest improvements. This approach rapidly unlocks new resources, allowing us to make bigger and better improvements with every cycle.

  • Strategy to Code

    The Plug-In Tech team is a full solution, you’re not hiring a bunch of developers you’ll have to nanny, or a CTO that prefers chilling by the pool in a far away country. We’ll work to understand you and your vision, create an appropriate plan based on this, and deliver it flawlessly

  • Scale up and down as required

    Unlike an internal team you can easily scale us up and down as you need – we can be all hands on deck to deliver a product – and then drop down to maintenance and support whilst we measure the impact and plan the next move. If you need to pause or pivot we can flex with you.

  • Team of experts

    Instead of hiring a front end developer who ‘does UX’ you’ll have specialists involved at each stage of the project – our UX engineers will design the user interface, our Full Stack Developers will build the database and API, our QA Lead will test it, and out Head of Development will oversee the whole solution.

  • No single point of failure

    With documentation, peer review of work and pair programming your will have a whole team who understand your product – no worrying about your CTO who is the only one who knows how the hosting works leaving!

Our On-Time Guarantee

We’re committed to delivering your project on time. If delays happen due to our scope underestimation, we’ll cover any extra costs, complete the work, and refund 15% of the project costs as a goodwill gesture. We’re a different kind of software development company.
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How People Feel About Working With Us

5/5
I just love The Tech Dept. I think they’re brilliant. I love them as people. They are really easy to work with. From a charity POV, a lot of private sector companies take advantage of us. We’re easy pickings. They bamboozle us. It’s really nice to have found a company to work with who are on the same page and have our best interest at heart. It’s never felt like a transactional relationship. More like a long-term partnership.
Helen O’Donnell

Children’s University

5/5
The Tech Dept are aware of the pitfalls and things that can go wrong – they’re grounded in reality. You can count on them because they’ve been through the good, the bad and the ugly
Ali Munro

Flutterlab

5/5
The Tech Dept understands our product and what we’re trying to achieve. We have a great working relationship with them. I like that they’re not too techie. They help us solve the problem simply. 'This is the problem; this is how we do it. There’s no rubbish around the side'. In contrast, other dev agencies need us to spell it out. If we don’t get the explanation exactly right, they don’t get it right. So they build the wrong thing.
Clare Baldwin

QHS (Vaccination Track)

5/5
We needed skilled technical expertise and strategic capabilities to help us deliver a number of complex digital projects. We engaged TTD as our “Plug-In Tech Team”, it worked really well. Their devs, strategists and PM joined our internal team and achieved successful delivery across all projects. They’re a brilliant team and we feel lucky to be working with them.
Pippa Irvine

D&AD

Frequently Asked Questions

  • How will working with you differ from hiring a CTO to manage all of this?

    We provide the whole skillset to deliver a product but we only apply it when needed. With a CTO you are paying for a CTO all the time, when really what you might need is a CTO a couple of days of the month, and most of the time you need a full-stack developer, a project manager and a test lead. We can deliver specialist expertise much more cost effectively than hiring a full time team, but much more coherently than bringing in a bunch of freelancers.

  • How do you foster collaboration between us and your team?

    We build this in from the start with the North Star Workshop – where we work to really understand your vision. We then work closely with you through the design and specification phase to make sure you know exactly what you are getting. As we move into development your project manager will keep you updated and you can speak directly to the technical team when your input is required.

  • Do you support products after launch?

    Yes – we provide support and maintenance packages to keep your product up to date and secure – we price all significant enhancements up as their own separate projects though to A) make sure we check that they are aligned with the vision and B) Give you control over costs rather than a nebulous ‘retainer’.

    Eventually you may get to the size that hiring a completely in-house team DOES make sense at which point we can help onboard and handover to them.

  • How do you cost projects and manage budgeting?

    All projects are fixed price/fixed scope – we cost these up based on time and complexity and this will be clear in the specification. We recommend retaining a small contingency for any additions that come up during a project – otherwise these will be added to a list for future phases of development.

    This means if we underestimate something in specification, that’s on us – we take on the risk.