With the arrival of COVID-19, appetite for investment has sunk in almost every industry. Many of our clients, retailers small and large, startups in cutting edge industries and established services businesses alike, have seen management significantly restrict funds available for investing in software development projects. Engineering efforts are often driven by teams striving to improve internal processes or by new requirements being pushed by sales and marketing departments, many of which have been put on hold for what is likely the next 6 months.

Although we’ve seen many startups (especially VC funded ones) continuing to hire engineers during this crisis, we’ve also seen many businesses sadly have to let part of their team go and others struggle to keep their engineering team busy. Many developers are working in “standby mode” as the projects that they were developing on have been put on hold. Companies are reluctant to let their engineering team go for fear of losing all of that accumulated know-how, but are also strapped for cash and looking for sources of funding to keep their company going.

At Resolve Digital several of our clients have called us to let us know that unfortunately they will be needing to cut their development budgets or pause work altogether. Our policy is to continue to support each one of those clients through these difficult times, and when they are ready, help them scale their development efforts back up again. For some of our clients we are their whole engineering team, for others we are an important component of a larger engineering team, but for all of them we offer the flexibility of increasing or decreasing the manpower on their team as needed.

So what do we do in the downtime? We build products. Products that have been on the backburner for too long and will finally get a chance to shine. Everyone on our team is usually working full steam to ensure we can deliver for our clients, and rarely do we get to use our talented developers to build some of our own ideas. Over the course of the next few months we intend to keep our team busy pumping out new products, upgrading ones that we have built in the past and improving themselves by learning new technologies and testing new ideas.

In a few months, we hope, we will start to get a grip on COVID-19 in countries across the world. People will eventually go back to work, toilet paper will again become available, and prospects for business will start to look brighter. We expect our clients to reach out and let us know that they are ready to scale up their engineering team again, and we will let them know that we are happy to get started. They will have the same engineers they know and trust, and who know their product well. We will continue building their roadmap right where they left off, with no time wasted. This is one of the most important benefits a flexible software development partner can offer.

How are you keeping your team busy during COVID-19? We’d love to hear what interesting product or project you are working on. Stay safe and stay home, let’s beat this together.