Frequently Asked Questions

Gigster’s vision is to democratize access to software development resources–both to help our customers be successful, as well as to provide meaningful work for our Gigster Talent Network. Gigsters want to contribute to transformative projects that have real-world business impact–applications that matter–and part of how we add value to our enterprise customers is through our lean lifecycle approach which produces customer-centric applications at startup speed.

As long as your company has committed funding and an executive sponsor, Gigster can partner with you to chart your technology roadmap and define a specific initiative to meet your business objectives. Provide details to begin the conversation.

Gigster provides innovation capacity to build strategic, custom applications that drive digital transformation and realize business value. Provide details to begin the conversation.

The Gig economy in the US alone includes over 50 million people and is an important source of top IT talent. Gigster’s business model attracts the top software development talent around the world by providing meaningful work, work-life balance, merit-based pay and community. Gigster cultivates and curates the right team for each client project from the Gigster Talent Network, focusing on the breadth and depth of roles specific to cutting-edge software development.

Despite the appeal of the Gig Economy, the management overhead for individual contractors can be substantial. Gigster allows its clients to tap into the benefits of the Gig Economy, while mitigating the delivery risk through its managed service. This includes identifying and recruiting top talent, onboarding that talent, staffing, ensuring quality and managing for results. Our managed service includes a full-time Engagement Manager accountable for business objectives and client success. Our delivery methodology ensures the quality of resources and deliverables across all phases of the project. The Gigster Solution Delivery platform monitors and enables teams to be successful, utilizing data such as scored assessments for deliverables and peer feedback reviews. With Gigster, you do not have to worry about an individual resource–any more than you would concern yourself with an individual server in the cloud.

With Gigster, you get the best of both worlds: the fully managed experience of a systems integrator combined with Silicon Valley speed and agility. Unlike SIs, Gigster operates on a fixed price, fixed scope basis, which means our incentives are aligned to complete engagements efficiently that create business value, rather than just billing for more time. Gigster provides comprehensive product and project management resources to ensure your software development projects meet business requirements and success metrics, freeing you from the significant overhead required to manage dev shops or individuals. Our iterative approach, combined with our delivery methodology also focuses on building the right capabilities based on real user feedback, avoiding “building to spec” projects that still result in market launch failures.

Our client engagement model is designed to cover the entire lifecycle of your digital initiatives, beginning with a critical Plan stage where we co-create the product roadmap and solutions architecture to align with your business objectives. With this foundation, we jointly define a committed scope and project price for each major release. Our methodology calls for user testing between releases to validate and prioritize features to adjust the committed scope of the next major release. This enables project planning and budgeting while providing the flexibility necessary to ensure a final application that meets customer needs.

Our customers own the custom code and all IP assets we develop for them.

If you have a funded digital transformation initiative with an executive sponsor, tell us more to begin a conversation. Our basic offering is a Rapid Results package that includes our full Lean Lifecycle approach: a plan for your full application, building a Minimum Viable Product, and maintenance until the next release.

We can schedule the planning workshop to gather requirements and define success metrics within a matter of days. This Rapid Results workshop is typically conducted within two weeks, and in parallel, Gigster will work with your team to produce a plan outlining the product roadmap, solutions architecture, and initial plan for a Minimum Viable Product. Additional specialist roles for the Build phase will be added as needed to your Gigster Delivery Team so they are ready to start upon your approval of the plan.

After the Rapid Results workshop, Gigster has the necessary information to assemble a full best-of-breed technical team with the right roles, skill sets, and experience to build your Minimum Viable Product, as well as to add key functionality per the product roadmap. Selected project information is shared with the Gigster Talent Network, and qualified prospects compete to be selected for your team. During the project, your Engagement Manager adds or subtracts team members as your needs evolve, ensuring your project has exactly the right skills mix for every phase.

Our iterative methodology focuses on quickly building out a Minimum Viable Product with core functionality to enable user testing and prioritization of other features in many successive releases. Your Gigster Delivery Team will produce software deliverables in two-week sprints that can be tested with users or internal stakeholders to validate requirements, with an MVP typically completed in 6-12 weeks. These insights combined with our deep experience with similar applications focus subsequent releases on additional, value-added features.

Gigster’s focus is on “applications that matter” or those that will be truly transformative for our clients. While many of our projects are multi-million dollar engagements, most of these started much smaller, with initial Minimum Viable Products in the $300k range.

Gigster staffs full project teams of five or more roles, including an Engagement Manager, Product Manager, Project Manager, Solutions Architect, Designer, and Software Engineer(s) part- or full-time as needed. For larger or more complex projects, we may add a Program Manager role. Our model includes flexible resourcing to ensure the right resources are applied at each project phase.

We go to great lengths to find and recruit the best product and project managers, designers and technical talent, who can deliver high-quality, complex enterprise applications at startup speed. Gigster was started by software professionals seeking to feed talented developers interesting work to create high business impact. We built a community around the Gigster Talent Network (GTN), who refer other A-list professionals to join GTN. Many are startup founders who have direct entrepreneurial experience, which is necessary for bringing startup product development methodologies to the enterprise space. Learn more about our Talent.

Gigster provides a fully managed application development service, so clients work directly with their Engagement Manager and Project Manager, who are accountable to ensure Gigster meets business objectives and keep the entire Gigster Delivery Team focused. However, clients also have access to communicate directly with particular roles or the full team as needed.

Gigster’s process begins with a Rapid Results workshop that enshrines your business objectives and bakes in success metrics. Our business outcomes database contains metrics from over 5,000 milestone deliverables, enabling us to optimize the productivity of our processes and ensure business impact.

Every project kicks off with a Plan phase, followed by a set of Build sprints that lead to a Minimum Viable Product that enables user testing of the basic product concept. Your application will be broken down into releases to address key functionality that achieve certain business results over time.

We employ modified agile processes focused on fast iterations and pushing new releases every 2 weeks after the initial launch.

The Gigster delivery solution includes technologies and communication platforms that enables virtual teams to work effectively together to deliver high-quality software applications independent of location. This platform also gives our Engagement Managers clarity around key project risks and status to manage progress towards outcomes for clients.

Gigster incorporates standard, best-of-breed technology stacks, including open source, based on the business objectives and for clients who are comfortable with open source. Our best practices also include internal templates and code reuse developed from hundreds of similar projects to accelerate milestones and business value.

Peer review within the Gigster Talent Network ensures deliverable quality, and our teams are compensated on meeting milestones with an incentive structure that ensures collaboration and high-quality output. Our methodology provides quality assurance throughout the entire delivery lifecycle including stress testing, user acceptance testing, as well as devops support.

Rapid Results includes a Run phase that includes maintenance and support for applications after the go-live date unless a customer explicitly opts out. We partner to address issues and deploy updates to run and scale your application in conjunction with client support teams, hosting, and service providers.

Our standard Run phase includes bug fixes to maintain the latest release during user testing until the next release or when the Statement of Work concludes.

We collaborate with your CISO to ensure that Gigster adheres to your security requirements.

All members of the Gigster Talent Network are under a strict NDA with Gigster, and by extension to any client project. During the bidding process, client names are not revealed. We only show your project’s details to the team that works on it.