Do you have a clear sense of what, exactly, it is that you're trying to accomplish? You say that your third-party product "functions, but barely". In what ways

Do you have a clear sense of what, exactly, it is that you're trying to accomplish? You say that your third-party product "functions, but barely". In what ways is it failing you? What do you want it to do that it doesn't? Can you articulate that? What features do you want them to implement that they aren't? And more importantly, what are they doing that you couldn't do without them? Before my current role, I was a PM (for a company of roughly comparable size to yours). And that job exists because "just make it do X" is in fact a project that requires days if not weeks of very deep thought, because X always involves dozens of assumptions and edge cases and complexities that are not obvious even with domain expertise. ----- To answer one of your specific questions from my perspective as the CEO of a tech recruiting company: > Besides, can we even attract experienced developers to a non-glamorous industry like logistics? Sure. Building an exciting product is something that motivates some developers, but it's not the only or even the primary thing that does. Common motivators in our candidate pool, in rough order of most to least frequent, are: - Being able to work remotely (this, all by itself, will 10x your candidate pool overnight even if you're not working abroad) - Salary - Work-life balance - Stability / trajectory - Autonomy / lack of non-technical meddling in technical work - Working with specific technologies Remote work + reasonable dev salaries is already enough to have a decent pool of candidates. And I suspect that the nature of this post means you're much more open to treating a dev team as a value add and not a cost center, which is already better than a lot of people do. I'd be happy to talk more specifically, if you want, about how you might pitch yourself to engineers (my email's in my HN profile - and no this isn't a sales honeypot, I'll tell you what we do if and only if you give a damn).