At what point did “adding a couple more devs” cease to be a solution?
The CTO frowned as he looked at Jira: there were now one and a half times more developers, and the time to market for features had also increased — not decreased, but increased.
The paradox is that the team is strong — Polish software developers, who were called “Europe’s golden pool” just yesterday. But the speed is not increasing.
According to the DORA report, increasing staff without revising processes in 7 out of 10 cases does not increase the speed of releases, and sometimes even increases time-to-market. This is not due to the level of qualification — it is traditionally high in Poland — but to the fact that the integration of new people into the old work architecture is subject to laws, not the wishes of management.
We aren’t talking about laziness or underestimation. The point is that even the best nearshore team will stall if it’s embedded in an old, HQ-centric work architecture. So maybe the question is not where to look for talent, but where it ends up.
Diagnosis Without Embellishment
Engineering Managers and Delivery Managers are among the first to notice that “more people” does not equal “faster work.” This is especially true in distributed teams.
The classic scenario: HQ distributes tasks and monitors results. The nearshore team is like an external service. Formally integrated, but actually living in a different reality.
In practice, it looks like this:
- Tasks go through several layers of management.
- Feedback comes with a delay of several days.
- Priorities change faster than updates can be communicated.
If you draw a diagram, these “hops” will look like unnecessary nodes in the network: each intermediate manager adds their own latency budget. As a result, the actual time from request to decision exceeds the SLA for internal processes, even though the task metrics are formally in order. This is where the RACI matrix effect comes into play, where roles are defined, but the real rights to make quick decisions are spread across several links.
The solution is obvious: before you hit “hire,” rebuild the architecture — from the communication diagram to the number of “hops” between the question and the answer. Don’t confuse past optimization with current optimization: the configuration has changed. And yes, it’s annoying when everything is done “right” and the system only gets heavier — because the longer the chain, the more critical it is how each link is structured.
A Scenario Where the Value of the Polish Team Is Reduced to Zero
Even top Polish developers won’t save the project if they’re stuck on a “delivery island.”
- Fintech. HQ in London, nearshore in Krakow. Discovery happens inside the UK office. Krakow gets tasks at the “implement” stage.
The Polish team writes clean code, but without understanding the business logic. The result is a feature that perfectly matches the technical specifications; however, it does not work in real banking in Poland because the bank’s API requires an additional authentication step that HQ was not even aware of.
In London, they shrug their shoulders in surprise: “Why didn’t you say so earlier?” — Who was interested?
The price of the issue: three weeks of rework, a missed release slot, and burnt-out developers who wrote “blindly.” It’s like asking an architect to design a house without telling them that it will be built on swampy ground.
- SaaS platform. In Poland, they are making a module that will be archived in a month — the product priorities have changed. The reason is the same: developers are not involved in the decision-making process. At N-iX, we’ve seen Polish teams sidelined this way — delivering solid work that never reaches production simply because they were cut off from upstream decisions.
Both scenarios could have been avoided if the nearshore teams had participated in discovery. Yes, it’s slower at the start. But it’s faster at the end because there are fewer reworks and “blind spots.”
A typical counterargument: “It’s expensive to bring everyone into discovery” or “We can’t give full access to data.” The reality is simpler: you can start with partial access or introduce an embedded role — a team lead from Poland is temporarily embedded in HQ.
Local Rules, Global Consequences
In Poland, fintech is not developed in a vacuum. Every project is subject to PSD2 and GDPR, and if Polish software developers are not involved in discovery, these requirements are often overlooked from the outset.
For the London team, this may be a minor “local nuance,” but for a production release in Poland, it is a mandatory feature. And so, a module that is perfect in terms of code fails bank authentication because someone at HQ was not even aware of the additional step.
Fixing such omissions at the implementation stage is many times more expensive than incorporating them into the architecture right away. And the most ironic thing is that irritation (“why didn’t they take it into account?”) quickly gives way to respect when you realize that they know how to work correctly, but we keep them out of the decision-making cycle.
Integration is not a gateway for tasks. It is access to the living logic of the product, where the value of the team is not lost along the way.
Models in Which Polish Software Developers Work at Full Capacity
The main thing here is not the map, but the route architecture.
- Shared backlog — a single list of tasks with clear priorities.
- Decision latency tracking — we record how long an issue takes from being raised to the final “yes” or “no” decision.
- Lead rotation — team leads take turns working at HQ and in Poland.
In one N-iX project, the combination of shared backlog + decision latency measurement for the first quarter cut the time for key decisions by 28%. Prioritization became shared, and Polish software engineers joined the discussion even before the ticket reached their Jira. There were almost half as many “blind” revisions.
But even the fastest development stalls if people don’t have a voice and access to data.
You might say, “We’re not ready to share internal information.” Then forget about internal speed.
Trust is a risk. But without it, there’s nothing to measure. Maybe it’s time to design in such a way that the word “integration” is no longer necessary?
Conclusion
The real challenge isn’t “how to work with Polish software developers,” but how to stop running two disconnected versions of the same project.
Lose control? — You’ll regain it over timelines.
They’ll make mistakes? — Yes, but they’ll fix them faster.
Add more people? — You’ll just replay this scenario from the start.
Map your dev process before scaling — talk to someone who designs systems, not just hires for them. Make that conversation part of your next planning cycle.
