A group of leading Polish software houses were at the Heureka conference in Berlin on Tuesday to showcase what’s hot in Poland. They were in town with Tash, a new platform connecting tech companies with software and design service providers. through a network of contacts, reducing the time and effort needed to find the right partner to outsource a project.
Wojtek Rolecki, co-founder of Macoscope, an iOS and Mac OS X design and development studio, was among those at the event at the Alte Münze, and he was able to find time to answer some questions in between the talks, startup pitches and pulled pork sandwiches.
SILICON ALLEE: What are you doing in Berlin this week?
WOJTEK ROLECKI: Obviously there’s a lot happening in Berlin these days in the tech and startup scenes. Being a tech startup from Warsaw and also being a company co-founded by people with successful startup exits in the past, we felt like Berlin Web Week is a great event to have a taste of it all in a relatively short timespan. Although we’ve been around for a couple of years now and have some stability, we still feel a lot like startup in many areas and like working creatively for and with other startups on their products, because we’ve been there and done that many times ourselves.
SA: Macoscope is a design and development studio – why would a company need such a partner?
WR: To create a successful software product or service, you need experience and talent in multiple areas. It’s not only coding. It’s also project management, planning skills, interaction and graphical design, user experience. Even ‘simple’ programming nowadays spans multiple different areas of expertise because of language and framework diversity and different customer-facing and backend technologies. Building your own team is of course possible, but it takes a lot of effort to find awesome people to work for you. Moreover, if you’re trying to move quickly, try out your idea, ship an MVP, you don’t usually have time for that. Companies like ours are kind of hubs aggregating skills and talents that span many of those areas.
SA: What’s the value Macoscope adds to a normal outsourcing experience?
WR: We are not a body leasing shop for subcontracting or just a bunch of nine-to-five coders. Building apps is our passion, we want to understand your future business and help create something that matters to you and your customers. If you’re really passionate about what you want to build, you need a team able to share that passion. We are such a team.
SA: What are the most common mistakes a software house does when dealing with a partner?
WR: It probably won’t sound very revelatory, but I think that most of the problems stem from inadequate communication. Lack of transparency and opaqueness of the process usually contribute to that. Talk, gather feedback, give feedback, communicate expectations, timelines, what can and can’t be done.
Another thing is lack of experience. We all do things for the first time every now and then. If that’s your first time with software development, you need someone who will lead you through a beaten path so you can focus on growing your business. In other words, look for experience and someone you can trust.
The Macoscope team, together with Iteo.co and Monterail, will be holding a workshop at betahaus on Wednesday May 7 called TashTalks#3 – Modern Stalking – choosing a development or design team is like choosing your date.
Article submitted by Giuseppe Colucci