One product company had committed to a release date that the team it had was not sized for. The work was real and the deadline was fixed, but it was a push — a few months of higher demand, after which the team would be back to a normal cadence. Hiring permanently for a temporary peak would have left them over-staffed by the autumn; doing nothing would have meant missing the date.
What they wanted to avoid was the usual version of this: a handful of contractors who arrive separately, never quite gel with the team, and walk out the day the milestone ships, taking what they learned with them.
The challenges we had to solve
- The extra capacity was needed for a defined window, not indefinitely.
- People brought in for a sprint often cost more in ramp-up than they return before they leave.
- Scaling back down usually means the context built during the push is lost entirely.
- The in-house team still had to own the product after everyone else had gone.
How we approached it
We fielded a small squad who had worked together before, rather than three strangers assembled for the occasion. People who already know how to split work between them lose far less time finding their feet, which matters most when the window is short. They joined the client’s standups and worked to its delivery lead, inside its tooling and its definition of done.
We planned the wind-down at the start, not at the end. As the release landed we tapered the squad, keeping one of them on longer to hand over cleanly and to fold what had been built back into how the in-house team works. The flex was the point: up for the push, down afterwards, with the continuity held by people who stayed accountable throughout.
Where it stands
The release shipped on the date the company had committed to. When the squad scaled back, the in-house team was not left holding code it did not understand, because the handover had been treated as part of the work rather than an afterthought. The client paid for the capacity while it needed it and stopped paying for it cleanly once the peak had passed.