About Fixico

Fixico is revolutionizing the automobile repair industry with its state-of-the-art platform that connects demand and supply in the automobile damage repair field in an innovative way. The Fixico application provides private vehicle owners and business partners a space to find a suitable repair company while reducing time and repair costs. Fixico was founded in 2014 and operates across a network of over 2,500 body repair shops throughout nine countries. They are headquartered in the Netherlands with over 70 employees spread globally.

The Challenge

Finding the right fit when it comes to choosing your remote team facilitator is crucial. This is because the future of your operations and product roadmap directly depends on the efficiency and effectiveness of the teams and the partners that support your product from the get-go. This is also one of the root causes for many companies to view remote teams and the outsourcing model with caution.

For Fixico, in order to scale their operations exponentially as their business requirements grew, they required a unique solution that went beyond the traditional outsourcing model of scaling. To keep their code quality and culture intact, Fixico was looking for a partner who was able to offer them a scalable dedicated team solution without the usual drawbacks brought about by talent outsourcing such as;

1. Loss of Control
   
   A traditional outsourcing partner may reserve all the rights to the way an outsourced team operates down to the core business and technical deliverables. While this may be good in reducing the company’s many headaches of moving into a new location, it may not be as great when you receive subpar performance and deliverables that don’t meet the required levels of SLA and timelines.As a tech leader, losing control of your own development track coupled with project execution instability and lack of responsibility can be quite an inconvenience. This type of hands-off outsourced development team model, therefore, may not be the ideal solution for many innovative and engaging tech leaders of today.




2. Low Cost – Low Quality Dilemma
   
   The age-old debate of cost vs quality is another dilemma many companies face when deciding to go in for the outsourcing option. It may look attractive at first, however, once the development cycle progresses, experiences in poor code quality can become a major drawback to your project timelines. Low code quality may not just be a result of poor skills. It could also stem from cultural, language and time zone discrepancies which can lead to miscommunications and misinterpretations of the project objective and requirements.Having a team that sits miles away, with unclear visibility from both the client and teams’ end can lead to disastrous results.




3. Poor Integration and Alignment With the Business Direction
   
   Any company thrives on the synergy of its people. Teams in the tech realm specifically tend to perform better when they have clear direction and responsibilities. A remote team without insights into a company’s vision, goals and culture are easily regarded as outsiders.This can lead to a number of challenges such as poor communication between internal and remote teams, idea mismatches and overall unsatisfactory performance.A prolonged misalignment in ideas leads to the overall objective not being achieved thereby causing irreversible issues in the long run that the company could have easily prevented with proper due diligence, market research and plenty of references to benchmark the ideal service provider fit.

In the case of Fixico,
this is where Gapstars came in.