Economically we can observe that tech teams are under a pressure to maintain productivity and deliver on roadmaps, a pressure that may have also changed given headcount changes. Internal engineers are balancing urgent BAU work with the big, high-impact initiatives that actually move the organisation forward. Leaders are left choosing between slowing delivery, burning out the team, or ruthless prioritsation.
There’s a better option.
A Counter team gives you the extra bandwidth you need, and frees your people to focus on the work where they create the most value.
The Challenge
Inside modern engineering teams, everything is important. Foundational projects, strategic bets, migrations, integrations, refactors… They all matter, but also all compete for the same people.
The reality: your strongest engineers often get pulled in too many directions. They want to focus on deep technical problems, but capacity constraints force them into firefighting, context switching, and work that doesn’t match their strengths.
Over time, that’s not just inefficient. It’s demotivating.
The Counter Approach
Bringing in a Counter team gives you a high-performing, embedded squad that integrates quickly and takes ownership of key roadmap or BAU initiatives. This isn’t “offloaded work,” but rather real, meaningful delivery, the kind that requires trust, pace, and accountability.
This creates space for your internal experts to stay focused on the complex, strategic work where they’re irreplaceable.
Our teams:
- Ramp up fast and slot directly into your workflows,
- Bring strong engineering practices that lift delivery across the board,
- Share knowledge openly so capability grows and bottlenecks shrink,
- Deliver at pace without compromising quality.
And when the project wraps, you can hire the engineers directly. No handover gaps. No lost context. No dependency loop.
A Win–Win Model
For your organisation:
- Delivery capacity increases, without permanent headcount or consultancy overhead.
- Internal specialists focus on the highest-impact work.
- Momentum continues across the whole roadmap.
- A try-before-you-buy path to hiring proven engineers.
For your team:
- Engineers stay motivated by working on technically interesting challenges.
- Morale goes up as people get to do their best work, rather than juggle priorities.
- Retention improves thanks to teams feeling supported, not stretched.
A Client Example
A client brought in a Counter team to take full ownership of a critical integration programme with a tight release window. Our engineers blended quickly into the wider organisation and aligned with existing ways of working, to deliver this smoothly and efficiently.
This gave their existing internal platform team the breathing room to progress a major architectural update that had been sitting on the backlog for months.
Two major pieces of the roadmap moved forward in parallel, read more about the work we did for East Midlands Airport here.
Unlock Your Team’s Best Work
When you free your engineers to focus on what they do best, the whole organisation moves faster. A Counter team gives you capacity today, capability tomorrow, and a stronger engineering culture in the long run.
If you want to see what that looks like in practice, explore our recent client work.
