Are Your Product Teams Falling Behind?

Adam Robinson
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July 22, 2025
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minutes

Here are 3 Critical Takeaways that will keep your Dev Teams on track – and save you costly missteps.

The average organization takes an average of 5½ months to hire one technical professional. Add 5 months to ramp that new hire to full productivity, and you’ve got 10+ months of lost velocity for one departed worker. Can your product roadmap afford to be stalled for a year as you search for, hire, and onboard a contributor? Multiply that across a growing team and your opportunity costs compound fast: missed deadlines, delays, and all the ground you’re giving up to competitors.

These are Lean Solutions Group’s (LSG’s) real-world benchmarks:

  • 30 days to hire
  • 3 to 5 weeks to fully ramp
  • 97% retention rate

The delta between those two timelines is your talent velocity — the cumulative speed of every step from recruiting through retention. LSG partners with its clients to reduce talent velocity enabling our embedded employees to deliver results faster than industry averages.

Talent Velocity: Industry Average vs. Lean Solutions Group Actual

Product Roadmap Domino Effect

When a key role is vacant for six months, what happens to your release cycles? Chances are, they’re blown. Filling a critical seat in 30 days instead of six months or longer can recover 80% of the throughput you would otherwise give up.

Sprint Velocity & Agile Flow

When your team’s headcount drops mid-sprint, the impact is immediate on user-story carryover, re-estimations, context-switching, and more. If it takes ten+ months to hire and ramp a team member, restoring capacity, that’s about 22 two-week sprints below target velocity! The top productivity blocker for 64% of development managers? “Inability to fill essential roles.”  

Teams that protect their talent pipeline see the opposite effect. 31% of developers are more likely to improve delivery flow when related job vacancies are closed fast, according to Gartner.

Developer Experience as Velocity Insurance

Headcount stability is the quiet engine of sustained velocity. Gartner’s 2025 DevEx Benchmark finds a well-designed developer experience can lead to as much as a 20% increase in developer retention – and a 31% improvement in product delivery flow.

Here’s why culture, not just tooling, moves that needle:

LSG pairs skills development pathways with a continuous improvement culture to achieve its 97% retention rate, demonstrating that as careers move forward, people move forward.

Talent Velocity Bottlenecks

LSG leverages near-shore and offshore talent with a structured process that squeezes each stage down to an efficient and precise minimum. This demonstrates how integrated process design can turn “speed hiring” into sustained capacity. By partnering with LSG, one client:

  • Scaled from 4 to 27 developers in 6 months with 0 attrition
  • Reduced average onboarding time to 26 days
  • Achieved an average 9.44/10 employee engagement and productivity score

3 Critical Take-aways for Dev Teams

  1. Think pipeline, not patches. Recruitment speed matters – but so does everything else. When vetting, onboarding, and retention of workers are permitted to stretch the timeline, project deadlines will certainly slip.
  1. Quantify your vacancy costs. Map the average time-to-hire and ramp a new worker against desired sprint velocity and release cadence. The gap is usually bigger than it looks.
  1. Invest in improvements to the developer experience as a force-multiplier. Flow metrics improve when people have the bandwidth and teammates to keep work flowing.
Success isn’t just building teams faster.It’s securing, preparing, and retaining workers fast enough to keep work from slowing.

For faster talent velocity, contact LSG for a discovery call. Start building your talent advantage with global tech talent pools.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam Robinson is the Transportation & Logistics Content Director at Lean Solutions. Adam is a data-driven storytelling marketer who has fallen in love with the quest to make supply chains as high-functioning, collaborative, waste-free, and productive as possible in an altruistic endeavor to maximize human capital. Adam works at the intersection of sales, marketing, and product, giving me a unique opportunity to build a community around a platform that meets my passion & personal mission of hyper-efficiency.

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