Managed Development Teams that we staff, run, and stay accountable for.

A managed development team is one unicrew builds, staffs and runs for a single client, with one named unicrew delivery lead accountable for the plan, the cadence, the quality bar and the reporting against measures the client sets. Cross-functional means analysis, design, engineering, ISTQB-certified QA and DevOps all sit inside it, so an outcome we are accountable for never waits on a role you have to supply. The team works only on your product, on your tools. It fits when the outcome is clear and nobody on your side has the week-to-week capacity to run another team.

By who is accountable for delivery. Here that is us: our delivery lead owns the plan and answers for the outcome. In a dedicated development team it is you, while we own staffing, seniority and quality. Staff augmentation sits one step further out again, individual engineers under your direct management filling a named skill gap. Plenty of clients run a mix, keeping core product work in a team they direct and handing contained outcomes such as migrations, integrations and internal tools to a managed team.

It turns on the size and shape of the team, so we scope it with you rather than publish a headline price that would be wrong for most engagements. The drivers are the roles the work needs (a delivery lead, analysts, engineers, QA, DevOps, design), the seniority mix, and how long you need the capacity. What we publish is how we bill, not a rate: a managed team is team extension, billed monthly per team member, with nothing charged separately for sourcing, vetting or placing an engineer. Discovery produces the team shape and the number before you commit budget.

Most engagements start within two to four weeks. The engineers are unicrew employees working from Ukraine, Poland, Estonia and the UK rather than a subcontractor chain, so staffing a team means assigning people we already have; where the work needs a skill the bench does not carry, we recruit for it and you interview the candidates before anyone joins. How long it then lasts is not fixed at signature: discovery produces the dates, and the engagement is reviewed against the measures you set rather than against a term.

Yes. Two examples, both takeovers. For a US B2B SaaS company we became the full programming team on a platform that had been live more than a decade, through a transition period the client describes as smooth, and cut its AWS costs by 30% or more. On a B2B CRM serving manufacturers and wholesale distributors we mapped dependencies, critical services and bottlenecks before moving anything, then migrated it onto Microsoft Azure with data integrity checks and backup protocols in place. That mapping happens in discovery, because it is where schedule risk actually lives.

A delivery lead or project manager who owns deadlines, budget and requirements; front-end, back-end and full-stack developers; a UX/UI designer; a QA engineer who tests for bugs and usability before release; a DevOps engineer who automates CI/CD and manages infrastructure; and a business analyst who turns stakeholder requirements into technical specifications. The exact mix follows the phase, so a build-heavy stretch and a stabilization stretch do not carry the same roles.

Your contract decides it, and it is signed before anyone gets access rather than argued about at the end. The agreement and the NDAs set out who owns the code, the documentation and everything derived from them, and how it reaches you if the engagement stops. Read those clauses before you commit, with us and with anyone else you are weighing.

Every engagement runs under our ISO 27001:2022 and ISO 9001:2015 certifications, renewed through a multi-stage audit with Quay Audit UK, with GDPR and NIS2 obligations and the NDAs settled in the contract before access is granted. We do not hold SOC 2. If security is a first-order concern, put four questions to us and to everyone else on your list: which country the code and the data sit in and who has reach into them, how secrets are handled, what happens on an incident, and what the rules are for AI tools on your code.

Five things. They come from our own guide to managed delivery vs team extension, which is the point: it is fair to hold us to a list we published. Ask for a shared backlog with clear acceptance criteria. Ask for decision records covering architecture and trade-offs, so nobody has to reconstruct in year two why something was built that way. Ask to be measured on delivery outcomes rather than hours burned. Ask for an explicit AI usage policy with mandatory human review. And ask for a clean handover plan from day one: documentation, runbooks and an ownership map. The failure mode of this model is the black box, and each of the five is a way of prising it open.

When you reprioritize weekly, because we would be optimizing hard against a target that keeps moving, and a dedicated team you steer yourself is the better buy. When the work is core intellectual property you intend to staff and own internally. And when you cannot yet say what done looks like, in which case the honest first step is scoping rather than a team. If the real need is one senior hire instead of a team, we will tell you that too. A brief with no outcome in it, only a count of engineers and a rate, gives nobody anything to be accountable for, and we say no to those.