Staff augmentation is an outsourcing strategy that augments the capacity of your in-house development by temporarily hiring out-of-house talent.
Staff augmentation is like renting a movie.
It’s a late night after a long day of work. You’re ready to kick off your shoes, change into the comfy PJs, and relax. You realize that you want to watch a movie, and you don’t own the movie you want to watch.
Unfortunately, you don’t make a lot of money and just spent your allowance on a brand new phone. So while you want to buy this new movie, you know that you fiscally aren’t in the position to do so.
So, rather than buying the movie, you have the option to rent the movie. It will cost you less money so it financially makes sense. On the down-side, you don’t own the movie, so it isn’t yours to keep forever and do with what you want. You only get the movie for the amount of time that you rented it.
Once your time is up, you give the movie back and you don’t have to pay for any of the overhead nor find any space to store it.
Staff augmentation is the process of using temporary workers to fill short-term positions within your company.
It's one thing to know what a term means, but that is worthless if you don't know why you should know what staff augmentation is in the first place. Let's break down the importance of this tech term based on two high level categories. We'll walk through an explanation as well as provide a score, 1-10, that shows you how much you should care about staff augmentation.
The first will be if you do not have a product yet. This means that you don't have a physical product. Maybe you're in the ideation phase, or maybe you're almost ready to start development. Whichever it is, we'll get into why staff augmentation is important and why you should or shouldn't care about it if you do not have a product.
If you don't have a product yet, you likely don't need to worry about this term as you have many more things to worry about! If you are on the path of getting your product built, then it may be worth familiarizing yourself with this term.
The second category is if you do have a live product. Maybe you just launched your business or maybe it's been live for years and you're continuing to improve its quality. Regardless of the scenario, if your product is live, staff augmentation carries a different weight.
If you have a product then this is definitely a term to know! If you are tight on money or just need some temporary support, this is the path that you can take. You don't need to augment your team, but that option is open if you want to accelerate your development roadmap without hiring full-time employees.
So you know what staff augmentation is, by definition. You know if you should care about it or not depending on your situation as a business/company/product. To dig in deeper, we will walk through some examples so we can make sure you really have a solid grasp on staff augmentation.
Let's imagine that ACME Corp. is a software company with a radical B2B software product that improves a company's advertising ROI through proprietary algorithms that optimize your search engine ad campaigns. We're going to walk through three examples as to how ACME Corp. leverages staff augmentation.