Embedded development teams

When you need to add development capacity, an embedded team from Tighten can help you ship features faster, hit your milestones, and improve code quality, without taxing your existing management resources.

A self-managing extension of your team

Our embedded teams consist of two developers and a dedicated project manager, who acts as the day-to-day interface between our team and yours, and maintains a groomed, prioritized backlog of tasks for our developers to work on. Our developers keep their schedules free of meetings, enabling long blocks of deep work to maximize the value they deliver to you.

Opinionated service, flexible approach

We have strong opinions about how to deliver development service, so if you’re agnostic on process, we’ll arrive with a fully-baked method. However, if your team prefers to do things a certain way, we’re flexible on the details, so long as they leave space for our team to do their best work.

The full Tighten team at their backs

Your embedded team spends their work day in Tighten’s Slack workspace with the rest of our developers. They all work in the same technical niche, solve similar problems, and have as part of their job the explicit imperative to help their colleagues when they get stuck or need advice.

So while a typical developer goes googling around for answers, Tighten developers go straight to the source. The room they are sitting in is full of motivated, specialized experts, so novel solutions to difficult problems emerge in minutes rather than hours. In this way, your dedicated team of two is able to leverage the collective knowledge of our entire team on your behalf.

Engaging with us

Each embedded team consists of a Lead Programmer and a Staff Programmer under the guidance of a Project Manager. For larger projects, up to 3 teams can be assigned concurrently under a single PM.

We book embedded teams in 8-week cycles, during which the assigned team(s) are fully dedicated to your project four days per week. Multiple 8-week cycles are often stacked in a single engagement, and your embedded teams can be extended for additional cycles, within certain parameters.

If your project requires research, strategy, UI/UX design, or another discipline, your embedded team can be augmented with additional Tighten team members, working under the same Project Manager.

Taking your team to the next level

Working alongside you for an extended period gives our embedded team first-hand knowledge of how your team works, where it excels, and where its growth edges lie. This puts us in an ideal position to help you level up with a custom-designed continuous growth program. Many of our clients choose to implement their program while their embedded team is on board, maximizing continuity and helping us deliver the most benefit we can.