Everything starts with an idea: coming up with an idea of a new product or developing an existing one. And the scenario is always the same. If you want to create something outstanding, you need to hire professionals. Even if you have an in-house dev team, you probably need at least a few more talents to manage the whole project and finally make it work.

Many product owners, especially in enterprise-level businesses, have at some point considered hiring a development consulting agency. Before making the final decision, they usually take into consideration hiring freelancers or building an in-house dev team. In this article, we would like to demonstrate what benefits working with an agency can bring you. We firmly believe that when you adopt a team approach from the very start of a project, it can enormously boost the project’s future success.

We love change at Netguru. Nothing is set in stone. You can define your working hours, shape your working space, and create your own career path. We do have some guidelines for each stage of your adventure with project management, but the actual career decisions are entirely up to you. So ask yourself: what makes you tick? And find your place in our team!

When you’re about to start developing your product and hire a freelance development team, you may not be aware of the unknown or unrealized costs associated with only hiring developers. In this article, we shed some light on the processes and infrastructure required behind the scenes to successfully launch a project. We will also reveal some of the risks related to hiring freelancers in comparison to a coordinated team approach.

We all complain about the lack of time. We don’t have enough time at work and weekends are always too short. So invest some time, read this article and learn the most crucial skills needed to manage time efficiently and have more time to do the things you love.

Agile project management is usually associated with adjusting projects to customers requirements and continuous improvement. Agilists value responding to change more than following a plan. That said, Agile also involves planning – especially high-level planning. Initiating a new project is an important and time-consuming stage of the project. This phase of software development is also one of the most misunderstood aspects of project management.

As a product owner you have a vision for the final product. However, it sometimes turns out that it’s impossible to carry out the development process strictly as you planned. You have to create a new actionable plan together with your development team. In this article we share our lessons learned over the 8 years of working with clients. We will also shed some light on the risks associated with poor communication during this step. Learn how to keep a smooth transition from ideas to outcomes.

Are you having problems with adding new features to your project easily? Are you unable to quickly make significant changes to the project? Maybe you spent a lot of money and aren’t seeing results from the development team? As a product owner, you might want to rewrite the application from scratch. Take a look at the possible advantages and disadvantages of such a solution and make a wise decision.

Okay, so you have an idea for a product. Congratulations - you’ve just made your first step on the path to success. But it also means that it’s time for your first important decision —  who should be in charge of developing your product. Basically, you have three options: hire a full time talent for your in-house development team, bring in a software consulting agency like Netguru or go for freelance contractors.

Netguru has worked with dozens of clients, ranging from startups to big corporations, for more than 8 years now. One of the key strategic decisions for any organisation thinking about software development is whether to hire full-time employees, freelance contractors or an agency like Netguru. Here are my tips on calculating the cost of each option, and what to look for when discussing pricing with agencies.

So the moment has finally come — you’re looking for a software consulting agency. You not only want them to build your product but would also like to receive advice on the best way to do it. You want an agency that will take you by the hand, guide you through the process and offer you some solutions to guarantee the best possible results for your project. Take a look at this list of things you should check before making a decision which agency to choose.

Netguru switched from Master to Pull Request flow on GitHub quite some time ago. You can read a developer's perspective on this change here. But now it’s time to explain it for those of you who do not necessarily code each day. Let’s go!

London and Silicon Valley are the strongest tech talent magnets in Europe and the US respectively. The best engineers flock to work there. However, it doesn't mean they are up for grabs for just about any company out there. They get immediately scooped up by the strongest players in the market and never become available again.

London. Home to red buses, black taxis, and one of the most inspiring and exciting hubs for tech startups and innovation the world has to offer. Check out this ultimate directory of startup venues every London startup mind should know.

If you want to become a successful project manager or help your project management team reach for the sky, constant learning and optimising your processes is a must. Why not learn it from the people who have been there and done that for over 8 years, especially if you can do it with a free ebook? 

How can you make sure that there is ongoing improvement in your project once it has entered an active development phase? How can you eliminate potential stumbling blocks that pop up from time to time? How can you ensure that best practices are maintained and problems minimized? The answer is simple - Iteration Retrospectives! Let me tell you how we do it at Netguru.

Much like it’s rarely good practice to describe what something is by detailing what it isn’t, convention would similarly dictate that it’s not always useful to persuade of the benefits of doing something correctly, by highlighting the pitfalls of doing something incorrectly.

Some time ago we highlighted the most popular mistakes that may ruin even the most successful project so that everybody conducting a business might avoid them. As a beginning entrepreneur, you already know what risks you should be aware of, but do you know what to do to start an IT project that will be a success? Having in mind our 7-year expertise in managing multiple IT projects at Netguru, we collected the most valuable pieces of advice on how to successfully kick-off them and we put them on one infographic.

A typical story: I (or another PM) gather a list of information from a client of what needs to be implemented to a web application in order to deliver it business value - we call it features. Essentially, a feature is a user story or a group of stories (epic) that are related and deliver a package of functionality that end users would generally expect to get all at once.

For years, Pivotal Tracker was our beloved tool of choice for task management. Every commit we worked on had to be connected to a Pivotal story. But, even though working with Pivotal was an efficient and productive experience, we decided to switch to JIRA. Why? We had several reasons.