Onshore delivery lead
AustraliaAccountable for the engagement, present in your hours, in your meetings. The person you call when something is wrong.
How we work
Small squads. Onshore accountability. Offshore capacity.
Eight years of delivery for Australian organisations has pushed us to a consistent shape: teams small enough to coordinate without overhead, led by someone accountable in your timezone.
Why the team is deliberately small
Two pizzas is the usual shorthand — if a team cannot be fed by two of them, it is large enough that coordinating it becomes its own job.
The reasoning behind the joke is real. Communication paths grow faster than headcount, so each additional person adds more coordination cost than delivery capacity. Past roughly seven people, work starts being spent on keeping the team aligned rather than on building the thing.
Small teams also fail more visibly, which sounds like a drawback and is actually the point. When five people are building something, a wrong assumption surfaces in days. On a thirty-person programme the same assumption can survive to user acceptance testing, by which time it is expensive rather than awkward.
Squad composition
What a typical squad looks like
Five to seven people. The shape shifts with the work, but the onshore lead is constant.
Technical lead
SharedOwns the architecture and the standard of what gets built. Reviews the work rather than only assigning it.
Engineers (2–4)
Offshore, overlapping hoursThe build capacity. Working from the same backlog and to the same definition of done as your own team.
Specialist as required
EitherData engineering, integration or domain capability brought in for the phase that needs it rather than carried for the whole engagement.
The hybrid split
How onshore and offshore actually divide
The common failure in offshore delivery is not capability. It is a full timezone separation with a contract in the middle, so questions take a day to answer and nobody local is accountable when something slips.
Our split is designed around that specific failure. The delivery lead is in Australia, in your hours, in your meetings, and is the named person accountable for the engagement. Build capacity sits offshore on deliberately overlapping hours, with daily crossover rather than a handoff at the end of each day.
The commercial effect is that you are not paying Australian-market rates for every seat on the team. The operational effect is that you still have someone to call.
Onshore
Delivery lead · client-facing · Australian hours · named accountability
Daily overlap
Shared standup · live review · direct access between your team and the engineers
Offshore
Build capacity · same backlog · same definition of done · same standards
Engagement types
Four ways engagements are structured
Most clients start at the top of this list. Very few should start at the bottom.
Assessment
2–6 weeksFixed scope, fixed price. Establishes what the situation actually is and what it would take to change it. Ends with a costed plan and a recommendation — including, sometimes, a recommendation not to proceed.
Ends with: A decision you can make on evidence
Proof of value
6–12 weeksA narrow build against success criteria agreed in advance, with the route to production designed before it starts rather than after it succeeds.
Ends with: Something working, and a decision about scaling it
Delivery
3–9 monthsA squad building in verified increments, with staged decision points where you can change direction, extend, or stop without losing what has been delivered.
Ends with: Working software in production, owned by your team
Embedded capacity
OngoingA squad operating inside your team, on your backlog and your standards, for as long as the capacity is needed. Reviewed at regular checkpoints rather than rolling indefinitely.
Ends with: Sustained delivery without permanent headcount
The sequence
From first conversation to stepping back
- 1
A conversation, not a pitch
We want to understand the problem well enough to say whether we are the right fit. Sometimes we are not, and it is cheaper for both sides to find that out in the first week.
- 2
A fixed-scope assessment
Short, priced up front, and useful on its own. You end up with a costed plan and a clear view of the risks whether or not you continue with us.
- 3
Squad formed to the work
Roles and the onshore/offshore split proposed against what actually has to be built, with the cost implications of each option shown rather than bundled into a rate.
- 4
Delivery in verified increments
Work reaches real users early and often. We would rather find a wrong assumption in week three than at user acceptance testing.
- 5
Capability transferred, squad steps back
The transfer plan is agreed at the start of the engagement, not negotiated at the end of it. Squads should be able to reduce or exit without the work stalling.
Quality & governance
Assurance built into delivery, not bolted on after
A separate assurance phase at the end mostly discovers problems too late to fix cheaply.
Verification before cutover
Parallel running and reconciliation against source systems before anything is switched over. The numbers agree before the old system is turned off, not after.
Review by people who build
Technical review is done by engineers working on the system, not by a separate assurance function reading documents about it.
Handover as a deliverable
Documentation, runbooks and paired working are scoped into the engagement. A system your team cannot operate is a system you do not own.
Checkpoints that can say no
Week four, week twelve, and each phase boundary are genuine decision points. A checkpoint that can only approve continuation is a status meeting.
Independence
What we don’t do
We hold no vendor quotas
No reseller targets and no partnership commitments shape our platform recommendations. Where that costs us a referral fee, it buys you advice you can actually weigh.
We don’t offer security assurance
No penetration testing, no red teaming, no security certification. It is a specialist discipline and we would rather work alongside a firm that does it properly than stretch to cover it.
We don’t scale to order
If the work genuinely needs thirty people in parallel, we are the wrong firm. We will say so in the first conversation rather than three months into a programme.
FAQ
Common questions
Why keep squads small?
Because coordination cost rises faster than delivery capacity. A team of five to seven can hold the whole problem in their heads and coordinate without formal process overhead. Past that, you start spending real effort on managing the team rather than doing the work — and adding people to a late project reliably makes it later.
Isn’t offshore delivery just cost arbitrage?
Done badly, yes, and it usually fails. The failure mode is a full timezone separation with a contract in between, so problems surface a day late and nobody local is accountable. Our model puts an onshore lead with you in Australian hours and deliberately overlaps the offshore hours, so the cost benefit does not come at the price of responsiveness.
Who is actually accountable if something goes wrong?
The onshore delivery lead, by name, in your timezone. Not a support address, and not an account manager who has to relay the question.
What if we want to stop?
The staged structure exists partly for that. Each checkpoint and phase boundary is a genuine decision point, and work is delivered in increments that stand on their own, so stopping leaves you with something usable rather than a half-built system.
Do you work fixed price or time and materials?
Assessments are fixed scope and fixed price, because they can be. Delivery is usually staged with costed phases and decision points between them — fixed-price delivery for work whose shape is genuinely uncertain tends to be priced for the risk, and you pay for that whether the risk materialises or not.
How do you handle disagreement with our team?
Directly and early. Embedded squads only work if both sides can raise problems without it becoming a contractual event. If we think an approach is wrong, we will say so and explain why — and then, if you have heard the argument and still want to proceed, it is your call to make.
Want to know whether this would work for your situation?
The first conversation is about fit. If the answer is no, we would rather establish it early than sell you an engagement that will not land.