High-Performance Collaboration, Outsourced Engineering Team, Remote Work, Software Development, Strategic Digital Nearshoring, Successful Outsourcing
For decades, global software development followed a simple logic: find the best talent at the lowest cost, no matter where in the world it lives. Time zones were managed, cultural gaps were bridged, and the software kept shipping. But as the global order shifts, that formula is being challenged, and so is the assumption that software delivery is immune to geopolitics.
In 2022, many companies with teams in Ukraine saw their operations halted overnight. U.S. export controls are increasingly restricting access to critical cloud and AI infrastructure in China. Attacks on undersea cables have exposed vulnerabilities in global internet connectivity. And more countries are tightening control over data, digital talent, and software supply chains.
In 2025, the conversation around globalization has intensified. Recent point to a growing consensus among economists and business leaders: the era of hyper-globalized trade and supply chains is being restructured. Rising tariffs, geopolitical realignment, and regional trade blocs are accelerating a shift toward localization and strategic decoupling.
What do these events have in common? They signal the arrival of a new era, one where global integration is no longer a given, and where resilience in software development must be earned, not assumed.
The Shift: From Globalization to Fragmentation
We are not witnessing the end of globalization, but rather its transformation. The model of deep, frictionless global integration that defined much of the past three decades is giving way to a more fragmented, controlled, and regional system. Instead of chasing the lowest cost globally, many companies are prioritizing stability, alignment, and resilience within trusted regions.
This shift is reflected in the rhetoric and actions of governments and business leaders alike. As international institutions weaken and trade tensions rise, companies are being pushed to reevaluate the vulnerabilities built into their global operations. Strategic decoupling, whether intentional or reactive, is now part of mainstream decision-making for many organizations.
Key drivers of this shift include:
- Geopolitical tensions and the formation of new regional blocs, as countries seek to reduce dependence on politically unstable or adversarial trading partners
Economic nationalism and policies favoring domestic or allied suppliers, including tariffs, reshoring incentives, and export restrictions.
- Cybersecurity risks heightened by nation-state actors, infrastructure sabotage, and the weaponization of digital supply chains
Regulatory pressure around data localization, intellectual property protections, and labor compliance, which can vary widely across jurisdictions
In this environment, global operations are being restructured not simply for efficiency or cost savings, but for strategic resilience, a foundational requirement for long-term continuity and competitiveness.
Why Software Development Is Affected
While physical supply chains have received much of the attention in discussions about de-globalization, distributed software development is also highly susceptible to geopolitical disruptions, often in ways that are less visible but equally consequential.
- A conflict, regulatory crackdown, or even targeted sabotage, such as damage to undersea fiber optic cables or critical digital infrastructure, can cut off access to talent or tooling, particularly if a development hub becomes inaccessible or politically unstable overnight. These infrastructure vulnerabilities add an additional layer of risk, as companies often depend on a handful of chokepoints for their global communications and cloud-based tools.
- Sanctions can interrupt payment channels or cloud service agreements, stranding teams mid-project or forcing abrupt transitions to alternative infrastructure.
- Engineering teams working across conflicting legal frameworks may face compliance or IP protection risks, as differing data residency laws or intellectual property rights create exposure.
- Developers may lose access to global platforms like GitHub, Docker Hub, or AWS services, or be forced to rely on unstable VPNs or workarounds that slow productivity and introduce security risks.
- Political unrest or changes in labor law may create sudden hiring or retention challenges, undermining team continuity and morale.
Increased scrutiny from investors and enterprise clients means companies must now prove the operational resilience of their distributed teams as part of vendor risk evaluations.
These risks may not be visible on a Jira board or in a sprint retrospective, but they are real, and they can derail product timelines, introduce hidden costs, compromise data integrity, or weaken overall software quality if not proactively identified and managed.
Rethinking Sourcing Strategy: Risk-Aware Engineering
To adapt, technology leaders are shifting their sourcing mindset from cost-driven to risk-aware. That doesn’t mean abandoning global talent, but it does mean being far more intentional about where, how, and with whom your engineering work is delivered.
This shift involves a more holistic view of software talent sourcing, one that accounts for not just operational capabilities, but geopolitical alignment, digital infrastructure stability, and long-term viability. It also recognizes that sourcing strategies are no longer static. In a volatile world, resilience demands agility and the ability to reconfigure delivery models when needed.
Here’s what that shift looks like:
- Evaluating not just the capabilities of a vendor and their people, but their geographic and geopolitical profile, including political stability, trade relations, and cybersecurity maturity.
Avoiding overconcentration of critical functions in one region or firm by building geographic diversity into your engineering footprint.
- Prioritizing alignment with stable, accessible, and politically compatible locations that reduce legal, regulatory, and operational friction.
- Building optionality into team structures, with flexible paths to rebalance, scale, or transition work depending on emerging risks or strategic shifts.
- Partnering with vendors that demonstrate transparency, robust identity verification practices, and ethical hiring standards to avoid risks such as misrepresentation or fraud.
- Incorporating resilience metrics into vendor evaluations, ensuring your outsourcing partners have contingency plans and recovery protocols in place.
The goal is not to eliminate risk altogether, an impossible task, but to anticipate, distribute, and manage risk in a way that protects both continuity and innovation.
Nearshoring: A Strategic Middle Path
In this context of economic and geopolitical uncertainty, nearshore outsourcing becomes even more strategic. Nearshoring offers a hedge against geopolitical disruption by keeping operations closer to home and within more stable economic zones. At the same time, it enables companies to achieve cost efficiencies and tap into scalable talent pools, without incurring the long-term liabilities and rigidity of direct, in-house hiring. This combination is particularly valuable in uncertain times, offering companies the ability to stay agile, control labor costs, and accelerate execution while minimizing exposure.
For U.S.-based companies, nearshoring, particularly to Mexico and Latin America, is a compelling alternative. In addition to cost and productivity efficiencies, it offers a blend of:
- Political Stability and Predictability: Mexico and key Latin American countries offer relatively stable political environments, reducing the risk of disruptive events compared to more volatile outsourcing regions.
Robust Regulatory and Legal
- Frameworks: The USMCA agreement ensures clear and consistent regulatory frameworks between the US and Mexico, offering predictable rules for data protection, intellectual property rights, labor laws, and cross-border commerce.
- Aligned Economic Interests and Strong Diplomatic Relations: Mexico and the United States share tightly integrated economies. These economic ties minimize the risks of disruptive trade sanctions, tariffs, or restrictive economic policies that have impacted other regions.
- Robust Bilateral Security Cooperation: Mexico coordinates closely with the U.S. on security, intelligence, and regional stability, helping reduce geopolitical risks in the region.
- Reduced Infrastructure Vulnerabilities: Proximity reduces reliance on vulnerable undersea cables. Mexico has robust, direct connections to U.S. networks, lowering the risk of major connectivity disruptions.
- Lower Cybersecurity Threat Exposure: Politically aligned countries tend to pose fewer cybersecurity risks. Nearshoring within North America under USMCA offers greater transparency and lowers the chance of state-backed cyber threats.
- Talent Integrity and Verification: Mexico and most major countries in Latin America have mature educational systems, established professional standards, and extensive verification infrastructures. This helps minimize risks related to talent fraud, misrepresentation, and credential falsification common in less regulated outsourcing markets.
- Ease of Geographical Diversification and Redundancy: Many nearshore vendors maintain multiple operational centers across Mexico and other countries in Latin America. This geographical diversity enables seamless continuity and rapid failover in case of localized disruptions, further enhancing resilience.
- Ease of travel and face-to-face collaboration, enabling in-person visits with minimal logistical risk compared to long-haul or politically sensitive destinations, especially valuable for relationship building, onboarding, and team alignment.
- Closer proximity to key stakeholders and decision-makers, which enables more responsive collaboration and deeper alignment between technical execution and business priorities.
This model doesn’t just mitigate risk, it often accelerates productivity and integration, thanks to smoother communication, greater cultural fit, improved responsiveness, and a more resilient and adaptable operational setup.
The Bottom Line: Global Isn’t Dead, It’s Evolving
Global software development isn’t going away, but the rules are changing. The companies that thrive in this new era will be those that treat resilience as a priority, not an afterthought. In this environment, companies must evolve from reactive adaptation to proactive strategy, embedding resilience into their sourcing, operations, and partnerships.
That means regularly auditing your current engineering footprint not just for efficiency, but for exposure and fragility. It means rethinking where your teams are located, how easily they can collaborate, and what contingencies exist for business continuity if disruption occurs.
And perhaps most importantly, it means partnering with organizations that understand how to build reliable, distributed capabilities in an increasingly unpredictable world, partners who offer not only talent, but infrastructure, cultural alignment, transparency, and adaptability.
In this next chapter of global software development, success will go to those who treat resilience as a strategic asset, not an operational afterthought.
Customer Experience, Outsourced Engineering Team, Successful Outsourcing
The show must go on: Developing a venue booking app with UPick
As the year winds down, it’s time to look back and celebrate all of our achievements of 2021, the challenges and the goals we conquered, and the clients whose projects we helped to become reality.
This time, let’s take a look at the story behind the development of the UPick app, which had the goal of creating a useful and reliable booking tool for both venues and artists, and how we helped them bring that dream from concept to a product you can use today. Enjoy!
What goes into making a good idea into reality? For the creators of UPick, it meant finding a reliable team that could build upon their idea, understand the concept completely, and offers the best technical know-how to bring it from paper into every smart device you can imagine. The beginning was simple enough; back in 2020, a couple of friends were looking into an area of opportunity no one else seemed to be exploring yet: what if you could simplify the process to book a show for a venue through an app?
The pandemic gave them a wide-open window to implement a solution for an industry that felt the consequences of this crisis deeply. Live shows account for nearly 50% of the music industry’s revenue, so six months into the pandemic, according to the World Economic Forum, shutdowns had already cost venues around the world 10 billion dollars in sponsorships and ticket sales, with no end in sight.
But with vaccination rates increasing, it was probably a good time to try and bring shows back, and UPick’s creators thought that an app that offered a quick way to reconnect performers with venues had some fertile ground to grow.
So, in February 2021 they started considering Scio as a partner, looking for developers who could create this app from scratch, decide the full scope of the final product, and make important decisions about the direction of the platform.
This was the first time our clients worked with Nearshore developers, and the advantages of having a fully experienced team equipped and ready to roll inside your own time zone became invaluable, keeping the costs of development down without sacrificing quality.
Since our clients had never been involved in a project of this size, constant communication to decide the specifics of UPick was critical, going from things like how to monetize the service, to the best hosting platforms to use.
Typically, development at Scio consists of a 5-step plan designed to arrive at a solution in the most productive way possible. Understanding users and their needs, as well as the objectives and constraints of the app itself, was Step 1. Step 2 involved analyzing the requirements of the app in order to trace a plan for the UX/UI and architecture of the platform. Then, Step 3 is pure Agile Development, up to the official launch, which was Step 4. And after the kick-off, is a matter of support to ensure the quality of the app, giving ongoing maintenance and adding features as a Step 5.
The Scioneers chosen were a Programming Lead who developed the architecture of the app, a UI designer tasked with creating a comfortable and stylish interface, another one assigned to create a search bar and review functions within the app, and a QA lead who would make sure everything worked perfectly.
Communication was key. Thanks to daily scrums, a core pillar of our process, we walked our client through the progress of the project, needing nothing more than 15 minutes every day to discuss the changes and challenges that surfaced, as well as what we accomplished, every week.
Here, we solved tons of questions born during development, like “how will a band schedule a show?”, “how will refunds work?”, and “how will the venues and bands make deals?” to more technical matters, like choosing a cost-effective hosting solution (AWS in our case), implementing login credentials from Apple, Spotify, and social media (including some necessary workarounds), to selecting the best payment processor.
Also, as we briefly mentioned, the business plan of the app had to be revised entirely once the booking process was decided, as Upick could easily be cut out from the deal between venue and performer, and our team took care of that.
The biggest breakthrough was deciding to make UPick a “progressive application”, where a web portal could function as an app with consistency across devices, like desktops and smartphones, making it as convenient as possible.
Then features were added, like the ability to share photos, videos, setlists, and even playlists from Spotify, and we had to rethink the way bands could contact venues as our understanding of these deals grew.
Progress went smoothly until finally reaching our Minimum Viable Product, where one of UPick’s users, whom the client showed a preview, managed to run all of their bands through the platform before it was 100% finished, which not only showcases the talent of our team but also made the customer base excited about the final product.
All in all, by September the app was ready to be launched, a whole project contained within the chaotic year of 2021, where Scio was able to offer the exact solutions UPick was looking for. A learning experience for both our team and our clients, we celebrate the effectiveness of Nearshore development, which can deliver no matter the circumstances.
The Key Takeaways:
- Since communication is crucial to make a product succeed, choose a development option that can communicate with you at the best time possible.
- It doesn’t matter if the details of your idea haven’t been ironed out yet, a good team will help you with those decisions.
- Development time of an app, depending on scope, doesn’t have to be too long. It took us around nine months to bring UPick from concept to reality.
- Some APIs are not very friendly, but there are always workarounds to any obstacle.
- If better ideas surge during development, it’s good to always voice them. The schedule might need to be reworked, but the final product is always going to be better.
Agile Methodology, Customer Experience, Project Management, Successful Outsourcing
If you search on the Internet for «agile project initiation» you are going to find a LOT of templates. People want structure and easy answers, so of course, these simple answers rise to the top of every search. Many (if not most) of the templates offered are pared-down formats from the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) Project Initiation Documents (PID). There is nothing basically wrong with the idea of using templates or most of the templates offered, except – they tend to become prescriptive when they should be taken as guidance.
From the Agile Manifesto: «…we have come to value:
Working software over comprehensive documentation,»
With that in mind, we should ask – why do we document agile projects? Often, the answer is – because it is required (by someone) when in reality the answer should be – to communicate. But again, that simple answer fails to guide us to the necessary outcome:
- Documentation should be a natural part of agile project initiation, but not the goal. It should proceed from on-going discussions between stakeholders, the product owner and the development team that is developed in Sprint 0, but it must not end there. The conversations and the documentation of outcomes must continue through the lifecycle of the project and the product.
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Initial documentation is just a strawman
Documents gathered from product owners and key stakeholders are starting points, not final documents. Documents developed by a designated team member to fill out a template are strawmen to be examined, discussed, questioned, and used as a base for the ongoing development of understanding within the entire project team.
- Living documentation formats should be preferred over static. In smaller projects, it may not be necessary to manage documentation formally, but in most cases using the same concepts as those used for source code management is a valid guideline. Properly maintained, living documentation answers the questions, «when was this decision made? by whom?» and gives a revision history that tells the story when necessary, but only makes it apparent when needed. It needs to include simple artifacts of these discussions – photographs of whiteboards, screenshots of modified mockups, etc. – in preference to notes developed after the fact and out of the sight of the team.
- During Sprint 0, the aim must be to develop enough trust among the project team members to allow questions and dialog to form the base for a common understanding of those items that are included in most PID templates. If initial documentation is «handed down from on high» to team members without open, trusting discussion – it cannot be internalized by the team and it will not respond to the inevitable changes that will come as discovery and learning continue throughout the project. Agile software development embraces change by allowing the project team to recognize the inconsistencies and discoveries that will come out during development, surface them and deal with their impact through discussion and collaborative negotiation.
And before we get too far away from it – there are some really strong ideas in the Agile Modeling page on Agile/Lean Documentation. Honestly, though, there is a lot of information in that reference that should really be digested as a part of understanding agile, not as a guideline for a new project. For that purpose, this short piece is a better resource. But, if the outcome of project initiation is not a bunch of filled out PID templates that we can all take back to our cubicles and file away – What is it?
Agile Project Initiation is All About Communication
With the ideas we have mentioned in mind, we have to acknowledge that open, trusting, collaborative communication does not happen automatically in an agile project team. There are natural stages that every group will go through before they can have the kind open discussion needed without fearing it will harm relationships and respect. Discussions need to be wider than the project infrastructure, technology, and user stories, without the feeling an individual is stepping over the boundaries by asking about non-functional issues. We might need to know:
- Does the culture and background of key user profiles matter to the software development team?
- Does the role of key subject matter experts (SMEs) in product development for an organization make a difference to who needs to be included in discussions?
- Are we using a Lean Product Development model with the inclusion of stakeholder users as part of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) development?
- If we are working in a DevOps implementation, how does that change our standard production procedures?
There are all sorts of questions that are not (and cannot be) included in standard PID templates but could be critical to a specific project. If we don’t discuss our viewpoints and ask questions, we run the risk of assuming we have a common understanding and making decisions based on those assumptions. Every project, every team, every organization is different. In the best case, we can open ourselves up to collaborative discussion by getting the team together, face-to-face during project initiation, for dialog and team building using team games and facilitation with a bias to being productive, explorative, and fun. Using these techniques, we can strengthen the bonds and shared risks necessary to maintain a successful project throughout its lifecycle.
In cases where face-to-face project initiation is not possible (hopefully more rare than the rule), much can be accomplished with video/voice meetings if they are relatively short and like agile documentation, structured just enough to ensure the meetings reach necessary outcomes and allow for continued direct discussions among stakeholders in the team when needed. There is nothing much worse than sitting in a meeting where a long, passionate discussion between two team members seems to be sucking all the air out of the room – and the meeting outcomes are lost.
This piece is relatively short and again, more of a guideline than a prescription for agile project initiation, as it should be if we are to «eat our own dog food.» Bottom line:
- Don’t be afraid to pull out a template when you start your next project, or when you look at it – crumple it up and throw it away so you can start your own list based on what you know and don’t know.
- What you think you know or don’t know are assumptions and should be treated as such both during project initiation and throughout the project. Only a discussion with open questions between team members can validate ideas and give us a basis for moving forward. And the assumption that is understood as valid today may not be completely correct at another time.
- Documentation must be limited to what is necessary when it is necessary and maintained throughout the project as living knowledge. Agile documentation should not be the domain of one person or one role. It must be available and dynamic – allowing everyone on the team to contribute when necessary – in a wiki-style rather than as a bunch of locked Word documents.
- Agile project initiation should focus on both the productive side – bringing together the information needed to organize the project, initialize environments, and the functional user stories needed, as well as the people/team side – developing the understanding, trust, and communication necessary to work collaboratively throughout the project. Ignoring either side is perilous. Assuming the job is done at the end of Sprint 0 is fatal.
Scio is a vendor of agile, nearshore services for software development projects with our customer base in North America. We can provide project-based or dedicated teams as required for each situation. We would be glad to discuss how our broad base of experience and skills could help you be successful with your next project. Contact us for more information.
We find these kinds of communication problems come up in many aspects of the provider/client relationship in outsourced software development. Agile and scrum development practices address these problems well, but in the case of offshore services, the agile model becomes stretched in ways that require adaptations that can be costly or distracting in the course of project operations. That is not to say that nearshore distributed teams, a model we use frequently, do not require specialized planning and adaptations, but it is part of our standard practice package, not something we do on a one-off basis. We find all projects benefit from attention to better communication and tighter relationships between our teams and their product owners. And we have that built-in advantage of nearshore; our development team is working in real-time with the client team. There is a lot more to discuss successful software development outsourcing – and we will be doing just that as we continue to provide information from the field.