Building software? Start with the right team

Things to consider and the first roles you should hire to succeed in software development.

From owning daily tasks to making system-wide transformations, consumers and businesses alike are increasingly leaning into a digital-first way of life.

The software industry is reaping the benefits. In 2025, revenues for the global software market are projected to reach $600 billion encompassing all industries. Everyone from Microsoft to Kickstarter-funded startups wants a piece of that pie.

In meeting this demand, you may be expanding a software product or looking to scale up your team between funding rounds. To secure unrestrained growth, you need more people who can execute your vision. Start with a team that fills out all the right roles, is skilled and has a well-defined culture.

Before you nab that team

caling your existing software product team can be a complex and lengthy undertaking. Looking for people to work with you could only add to the stress if you don’t nail your core setup first. Before you kick off hiring, it pays to think through the following:

Which team type is going to meet your near and long-term goals. There are three types of development teams: generalists, specialists, and a hybrid of the two:

– A generalist team is adaptable, able to stretch themselves to a variety of tasks. They cover more ground but may not have in-depth expertise to any given scope. This is the ideal setup if the goal is to improve and maintain your product without making intricate updates.

– A specialist team, as the name suggests, brings technical mastery to a project. You can trust them to build complex systems, and do it faster. However, they may not be as flexible, and constant step-by-step onboarding might be necessary to fill them in on tasks not related to their roles.

– The hybrid team gives you the best of both worlds. They can scale up or narrow down as required, allowing a wider space for their capabilities to shine. But even so, it’s not without cons. You’re essentially putting together people who work in different ways; you need great effort to create a culture that works for all.

Their methodology background. In software development, the two most common ways of working are: agile and waterfall. Experienced talent will have practiced either one or both. And while there is no definite ideal between the two, what’s crucial is determining whether your hires fit into the process your project requires.

– A waterfall process basically follows a sequence of steps, from analysis to maintenance, where each step is a prerequisite to the next. This is regarded as a traditional approach, making for a simpler creation process that doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room for abrupt changes.

All working environments benefit from organized team members, but waterfall is where they come to shine. Because this method underscores structure, lead roles are taken by people who can manage potentially big groups and oversee a laundry list of steps. They work best with team members who can align to their leads’ ways of looking and still maintain ownership of their own contributions.

– The idea behind agile is to roll out a product or update fast, with emphasis on frequent releases and constant iteration. It is the more popular approach, especially among younger teams, but it’s not for everyone and every project as you run the risk of burnout.

An agile process requires a lot of collaboration. You’d want this team to consist of agreeable individuals, who are open to hearing and implementing different points of view and can adapt to change quickly. A balance of technical background and soft skills would play really well in an agile team.

A third factor that software companies don’t think about until they’re knee-deep in building the team and finding it a challenge to get the best talent where they are. And that’s: will you hire fully locally or will you take it offshore? Tech roles are becoming harder to hire, with the supply of talent not meeting demand in U.S. markets. More and more, companies are looking to outsourcing countries like the Philippines for talent.

Now, who do you hire?

A basic software team consists of five to six roles. As with any other department in your company, it’s important to understand what each person can contribute to your bottom line. Meet them here:

Product Manager
Their key responsibility is to drive and define the overall vision and strategy. They handle budgets, do market research, find opportunities to meet customer needs through new and existing, and are less involved in the production side of things. Though seen as a high-level role, project managers can be hired offshore.

Software Developers
As the name suggests, software developers build systems or applications that end up in the user’s hands. Their work begins with identifying and planning solutions based on customer’s needs, writing code on which apps and programs originate, and includes the testing and deployment of a built product.

The Philippines may not be top of mind, but the country already has an established software development sector that produces a healthy population of new IT graduates every year. Even with the presence of major global tech players in the country, the opportunities for them are still limited here and they’ve got their eyes on international companies for remote employment.

UX Designers
They are concerned with the end-to-end user journey. It is as much of a research-heavy role as it is design-heavy. UX Designers really get to the heart of a user’s mindset when they experience a product, examining behaviors, motivations, and needs, and ensuring this is reflected in every tap, click, and scroll on the finished product.

UI Designers
A lot of people mistake UX/UI designers for the same role, and while you sometimes get a generalist who can wing both, apart they bring different things to the table. The output of UX design is a user experience strategy, and it’s UI design that translates it into a visual form that customers see. You can also think of it as adding a face to the developer’s work; they are the creatives of the team.

Both UX and UI design are relatively young professions in the Philippines, but they are here and they’ve got skills to show for.

Quality Assurance Engineers
While every software developer should unit test their own code, there are advantages to having a separate group on top of quality assurance. QA Engineers are focused on risk mitigation and reduction and serve a vital role throughout the development process. A well-functioning QA team pays for itself, keeps developers focused on coding and not testing, and helps ensure substantially error-free releases.

QA is often a good place to start your offshore team. Usually seen as “low-risk”, outsourcing this position does very little to disrupt a team’s current ways of working. This is true in a sense, but it extends to all software roles if you have the right offshore hiring partner.