The value of stable development teams – from Junior Developer to Team Lead

WhiteAway is one of Scandinavia’s largest online white goods retailers, selling products to both private and business customers. The white goods industry is highly competitive; there are small margins on the products, which requires a high sales volume and low purchase prices. In addition, customer expectations for e-commerce and service are increasing, so WhiteAway has a constant focus on optimizing their technology and services, e.g. through automation of manual processes. To deliver stable e-commerce platforms, continuous improvements and new digital initiatives, it requires both strong IT skills and scalability in the development organization.

For WhiteAway, the solution has been a dedicated development team in Poland, built since 2020 in close collaboration with Conscensia. With Anne-Mette Patscheider as Director of Tech Development, WhiteAway has had a clear goal in having development teams in Poland: to ensure a robust and flexible development capacity, without compromising on the quality of development work, collaboration and business understanding.

Discover how WhiteAway succeeded in getting extra development power in Poland, and even a team with such good IT skills that one developer advanced from junior developer to Team Lead in 5 years.

Working with an IT team in Poland makes a measurable difference

When a company decides to establish an IT team abroad, Anne-Mette Patscheider says it is a management task to explain to the organization that the new team is like-minded with the Danish developers. There can’t be a “them” and “us”. Anne-Mette explains: “It’s management’s responsibility to defuse the situation and explain that the foreign team will not take over the work of the Danish developers. It’s very important that the Polish developers are integrated into the development organization, otherwise the collaboration will not work.”

Anne-Mette has managed to get the Polish IT team closely integrated into WhiteAway’s development setup. In practice, this means that WhiteAway has mixed teams with both Danish and Polish developers, so both locations have the same knowledge and participate in the same meetings.

Anne-Mette Patscheider also recommends encouraging an open dialog where the Polish developers’ good ideas are welcome. She has good experience of delegating responsibility for projects so that they gain a business understanding of WhiteAway and its needs. When the team understands the business, they can easily translate it into code.

Last year Anne-Mette promoted one of her developers in Poland; “When we had a vacant Tech Lead position, I had no doubt that Barbara should be offered this leadership position. Barbara is excellent at planning and executing, and we need that.”

Barbara: Five years of development and a strong Team Lead

Barbara has been part of WhiteAway’s Polish development team since 2021, and her journey illustrates one of the key benefits of a dedicated team model: continuity and development over time.

Over the past five years, Barbara has contributed technical expertise, a solid domain understanding and a growing role in collaboration across Poland and Denmark. Barbara’s development can be described through three distinct tracks:

Greater technical responsibility
Over time, Barbara has taken more ownership of tasks and deliverables, which has strengthened the team’s progress and quality. When responsibility stays within the team, it creates better flow – and fewer dependencies.

Bridging and collaboration
As part of a distributed setup, the ability to collaborate across teams is crucial. Barbara’s experience has helped ensure coherence between needs and solutions – and contributed to strong collaboration between team members in Poland and Denmark.

Knowledge sharing and team development
With several years of experience in both WhiteAways and their e-commerce platform technology, Barbara has helped lift the team through sparring, onboarding new colleagues and focusing on good standards in everyday life.

Anne-Mette adds: “Barbara has good people skills, is extremely technically skilled and is interested in our business. And I think she actually sees herself more as an employee at WhiteAway than at Conscensia. She’s not just an external consultant, she’s deeply integrated into WhiteAway.”

Barbara also really enjoys working for WhiteAway and her development over the last 5 years.

Collaboration with Conscensia

The collaboration between WhiteAway and Conscensia has been about much more than recruiting skilled software developers and an office for their team. It has been a partnership focused on building a team with the right IT skills for WhiteAway – and sparring to make the collaboration work in practice.

Anne-Mette says: “The relationship, cooperation and chemistry with Conscensia’s Customer Success Manager Sonja Strycharska in Poland is very important. We can talk openly and honestly and say when something is not working; and then change the factors that can be improved.”

For WhiteAway, it is also of great value that Conscensia has social activities and a good working environment and company culture in the Warsaw office, just like WhiteAway has in Denmark.

Anne-Mette has good advice for other companies looking to establish a new nearshore team abroad. There is often a lot of focus on prices and profiles, but the ability to make the collaboration work in a busy workday is extremely important. The team must have a high understanding of the business, and you need to respect the team as independent individuals, who can think for themselves.

With a dedicated team in Poland and a close collaboration with Conscensia, WhiteAway has created a setup that can support both daily operations and development of their e-commerce platform. The team has become an important part of WhiteAway’s development department, and with profiles like Barbara, the value grows year by year with more domain knowledge, better collaboration and higher quality deliveries.