What is Staff Augmentation and is It Worth it? - Aram Melkoumov & Sergey Ross

Product Innovation Series with Aram Melkoumov

Follow Aram Melkoumov on Linkedin for highlight clips and DMs.

About Aram
Aram Melkoumov is the CEO of Crowdlinker. Crowdlinker is an end-to-end digital product studio based in Toronto and Barcelona. Crowdlinker turns 10 in the fall of 2022. He works with startups like Freshbooks and enterprises like Unilever.

SHOW NOTES:
0:08 | What is staff augmentation and why do we need it?
01:28 | How to execute staff augmentation correctly.
03:13 | Staff augmentation: how to test for team fit to avoid difficulties
05:36 | Why do companies choose to do staff augmentation?
09:04 | Staff augmentation for companies scaling past Series A
09:50 | How are staff augmentation contracts structured?
12:46 | How much does staff augmentation cost? (squad model vs. time materials model)
14:19 | Hiring a product studio vs. hiring a dev agency: what should you do and when?
17:30 | How to select the right product studio for staff augmentation.
20:05 | Can you test product studios before hiring them for a big project?

QUOTES:
“Staff augmentation is a concept where you take, you know, individuals like a product manager, a developer, a designer - and a company can hire those people and make them part of their team.” [00:27]
“Squad model is really great for longer-term kind of projects, a few months long. Whereas time and materials model is good for open-ended shorter-term projects.” [13:55]
“This is an onboarding period with any type of new project and like a honeymoon phase, right? So, you know you typically get to know pretty quickly whether or not the product studio that you hire is good or not based on how prepped and how ready they are coming into say the kickoff meeting or what are some of the questions they ask even during the sales process.” [19:05]

Follow Aram Melkoumov
https://www.linkedin.com/in/melkoumov/?originalSubdomain=ca

Work with Crowdlinker:
https://www.crowdlinker.com/contact