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At some point in every tech company's life, there has probably been at least one "experiment" with offshore resources. The allure of low cost and high bandwidth labor is just too great to never give it a shot.

The problem with these experiments is that they have a chance for failure. And if you are reading this, I could probably guess how your last experiment ended up.

So what is the trick? If you keep getting burned by inconsistent and poor-quality results, how is it that offshore resources are still a thing? Are offshore resources the Silicon Valley equivalent of the Nigerian Prince scam? The answer may not be what you expect.

It's not them—it's you.

There’s a chance that you are not working with your offshore resources correctly. There is nothing inherently handicapping a developer in Egypt from being just as talented and dedicated as someone who was born and raised in Santa Monica. They have the internet, education and the deep-seated motivation to eat.

What these people generally don't have is the environment for success that a full-time employee would get. It is important to avoid treating these folks as “them” from day one. The result may be that they respond accordingly.

The good news is, it probably isn't your fault.

The whole reason you hired these resources is that you are under the gun, running out of runway and have 265 tickets on your JIRA board under "TO-DO." In crunch scenarios like this, you certainly can be forgiven for falling for the "too good to be true" solution. All you really have time for is to "assign the tickets and forget about them." But let’s flip the script and see what this looks like from the offshore resource's perspective.

This person is brand new to your company and product. They haven’t so much as installed your app before, let alone internalized what your value prop is nor the intended behavior of your product. With this limited knowledge, the only thing they have to go on is the text actually included in the ticket assigned to them, which was originally written for your internal team to read and may lack essential details.

How To Get More Reliable Output

1. Context is king.

If you were to hire a full-time, in-the-office engineer, their first "task" assigned to them would likely be along the lines of "meet the team," "go out to lunch" and "play around with the app." While this is hard to think of as an assignment for an offshore resource, an abbreviated version that allows them to meet via video chat with the people they will be directly interacting with can go a long way to establishing context.

Setting up a precedent of face-to-face video interactions will bring them along, and see your project as more than just a small paycheck. Ultimately, though, you need to spend some time re-writing or, at minimum, augmenting your tickets. The time you invest in providing a clear picture of what the problem is, how the solution should work and what you are expecting will pay off with less explaining and reworking down the line.

2. Demo, Demo, Demo

No matter what project you have these resources working on, checking their work will take time. You either have to download a whole separate version of your application, find special login credentials or, in some cases, generate extensive test data.

At the same time, you can't exactly ship features developed by offshore talent without seeing them for yourself. You can skirt around this by using the offshore resource's time to record and send you a working demo.

Leverage tools like Loom or a QuickTime screen recording to have your developers show their work and walk through the test cases they covered. More often than not, they will go through several attempts at making the demo as they will discover (and fix) bugs during the recording process.

3. Show your results.

No one wants to work on a project that doesn't have an impact. You asked these resources to build you something—when it goes live, let them know.

After it hits the market, you are likely already following a process of measuring the outcomes and effectiveness of your new features. Simply sharing that information with the developers who built it will encourage them to continue striving to deliver high-quality work.

Don't be afraid to also show when a feature has disappointing results or acquisition. You may be surprised as to what insights or suggestions the people who built your product have that may be the difference between a dead feature and one users love.

Putting It Together

Offshore resources are far from being a scam when leveraged appropriately. As long as you are entering into the relationship with open communication, provide context and have your resources "show their work," you should be able to improve the consistency and quality of the output.

Avoid falling into the finger-pointing trap of "us versus them" and bring everyone along for the ride. With process-supported offshore development, your small internal team can multiply its velocity while keeping your stakeholders and users happy with a bug-free and delightful experience.