Engineering new products is hard. Any product that is worth building must be an advance over what already exists, so building it must involve solving new problems. Of course, there are always schedule and budget constraints. And product definition inevitably changes through the development cycle.

Remote contract engineering is, in some ways, even harder. Product companies use contract engineering firms to make their budget dollars go further, to get skills that are hard to hire for, and to scale resources up and down as needed; but in exchange for these benefits there are communication and management challenges. Across the industry, according to our clients, more than 20% of outsourcing projects are outright failures. Yet we’ve delivered more than 400 successful contract-engineering projects for our clients over the last 20 years, with a success rate of over 98%.