Three engagement models — and when each one breaks

We offer three engagement models. They sound interchangeable. They are not.

Dedicated Team

Best for open-ended product builds. You bring a roadmap; we embed a senior squad that ships every sprint.

It breaks when the client doesn't actually have a roadmap. A dedicated team without a product owner becomes an expensive consulting exercise. Fix: hire a product person — or move to Fixed Bid for the first 60 days.

Fixed Bid

Best for well-scoped projects with a hard deadline. We give you a SoW, milestones and a fixed price.

It breaks when scope is squishy. "Build an internal CRM" is not a Fixed Bid project — it's a Dedicated one in disguise. Fix: spend a week scoping carefully before signing.

Managed Services

Best for live systems that need ongoing care. Patches, upgrades, small enhancements, monitoring.

It breaks when used as a roadmap-execution vehicle. If you want big new features, Managed Services will feel slow. Fix: graduate big-feature work to a Dedicated engagement.

Picking right is half the project

Three questions to ask before kick-off:

1. Is the scope frozen or evolving?
2. Is the timeline fixed or open?
3. Is this build, evolve, or run?

Answer those, and the model picks itself.

What it looks like in practice

A few real patterns we see across engagements:

• Dedicated Team → Managed Services. A client builds their core product with a dedicated squad, then downshifts to Managed Services once the roadmap stabilizes and the priority becomes uptime and small enhancements over new features.
• Fixed Bid → Dedicated Team. A well-scoped MVP ships on a Fixed Bid contract. It gets traction, the roadmap opens back up, and the client moves to a Dedicated Team to keep building without re-scoping every quarter.
• Managed Services from day one. Some clients inherit a legacy system they didn't build and just need it kept alive, patched, and slowly modernized. They never need a Dedicated Team at all.

Red flags we watch for

Regardless of which model a client picks, a few signals tell us early that we might be in the wrong one:

• Scope conversations keep circling back to "well, it depends" — a sign the engagement should have started as Dedicated, not Fixed Bid.
• A Dedicated squad is idle waiting on decisions — a sign the client needs a product owner, or the engagement should shrink to Fixed Bid milestones.
• Managed Services tickets keep asking for net-new features — a sign it's time to talk about a Dedicated engagement instead of stretching the support contract.

The takeaway

None of these models is better in the abstract. The failure mode is always the same: picking based on budget optics instead of what the work actually needs. Ask the three questions above before you sign anything.