Over the last couple of decades, the way we build products has changed dramatically. Yet one thing hasn’t caught up fast enough: how companies hire teams.

Startups still post job openings. Founders still scramble to hire “just one more developer.” 

CTOs still spend weeks interviewing candidates who may or may not join. And when they finally assemble a team, the next challenge begins – helping them learn to work together.

But what if the whole idea of hiring individuals for product development is the wrong starting point?

What if founders didn’t need to hire people at all…
but instead hired teams?

Welcome to Team-as-a-Service (TaaS), the next big shift in tech hiring.

Why Traditional Hiring Is Breaking Down

Ask any founder about hiring, and you’ll likely hear a deep sigh.

• “Good developers are hard to find.”

• “The team isn’t shipping fast enough.”

• “We hired talent, but they don’t work well together.”

• “Building an in-house team is too slow for our market.”

These challenges aren’t personal. They are systemic.

Traditional hiring assumes:

1. You first hire individuals

2. You then try to mold them into a functioning team

3. And you hope they deliver quickly

But teams don’t magically form.

They go through forming, storming, norming, performing – each stage taking weeks or months. For a startup burning cash every day, this delay is risky.

More importantly, modern product development requires cross-functional collaboration – product, design, engineering, QA, DevOps, and sometimes marketing. Hiring each role individually introduces friction at every turn.

Between interviews, onboarding, performance issues, and replacing team members… you slowly realize that hiring individuals isn’t scalable.

And this is where Team-as-a-Service begins to shine.

What Exactly Is Team-as-a-Service (TaaS)?

TaaS flips the hiring model:

Instead of hiring individuals, you hire a ready-made, cross-functional team.

A team that:

• already knows how to work together

• already follows an established process

• already has complementary skills

• already has the rituals, habits, and trust built in

Think of it like plug-and-play for product development.

You don’t hire people.
You hire outcomes.
You hire speed.
You hire clarity.

And most importantly, you hire a working team rather than trying to assemble one yourself.

Why TaaS Is Not Offshoring: The Crucial Difference

At first glance, Team-as-a-Service may seem similar to what offshoring companies have offered for years. But the similarities end at the surface. 

Offshoring firms typically assemble a team after a contract is signed. These individuals often haven’t worked together before, and as a result, they enter the familiar forming, norming, storming cycle. Weeks are spent building alignment instead of building the product.

Squads work differently. Our teams are made of curated, self-selected freelancers who have shipped together before. They arrive as a ready-performing unit with shared rituals, coding standards, communication habits, and a proven delivery rhythm. They don’t need time to “become” a team – they already are one.

This difference matters. Offshoring depends on hierarchy and task assignment. Squads depend on self-organization, pairing, weekly reflection, and outcome-driven delivery. Offshore vendors optimize for utilization. Squads optimize for progress, clarity, and value. And while offshoring often creates single points of failure, squads naturally distribute knowledge across the team and the system.

In simple terms: Offshoring builds a team after the contract. Squads arrive as a team before the work begins.

Why TaaS Works So Well

Here are the reasons many companies are moving toward TaaS.

1. Teams Perform Better Than Individuals

A group of talented individuals does NOT equal a high-performing team.

Teams perform through:

• shared context

• mutual trust

• communication patterns

• peer accountability

All these require time to shape.

But TaaS teams already have that time invested.

They’ve shipped together.
They’ve failed together.
They’ve improved together.

They bring that maturity to your product from week one.

2. The Cost of Forming a Team Is Hidden – and Huge

Most founders underestimate:

• the time for onboarding

• finding out if the person is a right fit or not

• time to understand each other’s strengths

• rework due to miscommunication

• refactoring because of misaligned decisions

• energy wasted in friction

TaaS eliminates that entire lifecycle.

The team arrives pre-aligned.

You save weeks of trial and error – and thousands of dollars.

3. Perfect Fit for Lean Startup and Agile Delivery

A Lean Startup needs speed.
Not speed for the sake of speed, but speed for validated learning.

TaaS teams:

• work in weekly iterations

• review progress weekly with stakeholders

• run retrospectives from day one

• set expectations upfront

• remove non-essential practices (waste)

This means less fluff, more stuff, fewer meetings, more delivery, and the exact cadence early-stage startups need.

4. Scaling Becomes Easy (and Predictable)

Want to accelerate? Add more capacity.
Want to slow down? Reduce the squad size.
Need a specialist? Add one for a few weeks.

This elasticity is impossible with full-time hiring.

5. No Single Point of Failure

With individual freelancers, if someone disappears, your project halts.

With TaaS:

• knowledge is shared

• pairing is common

• the squad covers for each other

Your momentum stays intact.

A Simple Real-World Example

A founder once told me:

“I hired three freelancers. All were good individually, but the product simply wasn’t moving. They weren’t a team.”

This is common.

He replaced them with a 4-person squad – PM, designer, frontend developer, backend developer.

In the first week, he saw more clarity than he had seen in two months.

Why?

Because the squad didn’t need to become a team.
They already were.

Is TaaS the Future of Tech Hiring?

If we look at how companies evolve, the answer seems likely.

• Startups want speed.

• Tech leaders want quality.

• Founders want predictability.

• Teams want autonomy.

• Investors want evidence.

TaaS checks all of these boxes while removing the pain of traditional hiring.

The question is no longer:

“Should we try TaaS?”
but
“Can we afford not to?”

If you want to explore how Squads.com provides world-class cross-functional teams ready from day one, feel free to reach out at  📩 hello@squads.com or schedule a virtual discovery call.