Challenge
My Muscle Chef had tried traditional offshoring and outsourcing providers in the Philippines and India, but they had major flaws: poor code quality, miscommunication, and a lack of integration into their own team and processes. This led to a two-tiered approach where the offshore team were only assigned low-priority tasks, which the Australian team then had to fix, ultimately slowing down development rather than speeding it up.
We had tried outsourcing but it always cost us more time and money to fix than it saved and increased tech debt. The Scalers are completely different. The engineers they found work the exact same as our local ones and they have created our culture there. We finally have a cost-effective way to scale.
They needed an offshore team of quality engineers who could work as part of their main team in order to scale their operations. After searching the market again with their new criteria, they discovered The Scalers.
Solution
The Scalers searched the more than 2 million tech talent pool in Bangalore, India, for suitable candidates for My Muscle Chef’s Fullstack Web Engineer roles. Within six weeks, they were onboarded and integrated into My Muscle Chef’s technical environment.
The difference in the quality of engineers and the operating model was immediate. Soon, the new employees were working on the core roadmap following typical code review processes. Work is now split by skill, not location, leading to a dramatic increase in delivery.
My Muscle Chef soon found the time difference to be an advantage. They still had half a day of crossover and gained additional development time, helping them tackle the most pressing tasks faster.
A dedicated Chief Happiness Officer was assigned to instil My Muscle Chef’s culture in the Bangalore team. The regular engagement activities caused one engineer to say it’s “the best place I’ve ever worked” and have been key to performance and retention.
To me, typical offshoring or outsourcing is usually about cost saving and not scaling. I wanted a properly distributed model where we have a true team where I have control over all my engineers and can scale when needed. We now have this in place and it is working very well.
The outcome
My Muscle Chef’s team extension has become a value-adding addition to their web development team, accelerating development. With an offshore model that works, My Muscle Chef has been able to leverage India’s tech talent pool and time zone advantage to deliver new features and critical fixes faster. My Muscle Chef is planning to expand its development team soon and is ready to add additional roles and functions when it expands into new markets.
