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The strategic value of internal development teams
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“Writing code is the easy part.”
It's a bold statement by Tre Plus founder Rens Gerritsen, but for e-commerce scale-ups drowning in technical dept, it's the hard truth. When the backlog grows faster than the roadmap, most founders instinctively hire a digital agency to get more hands to work. But treating developers like machines that spew out code is a trap. You may get the features you've asked for, but not the platform you'll need to survive over the next five years.
As Rens told Sander Mangel: the real competitive advantage lies not in syntax, but in institutional knowledge. By outsourcing your core development, you're not buying speed. You rent intelligence that you will eventually have to pay twice. To scale sustainably, you don't need more resources. You need a technical heart that beats within your own company.
The plug and play developer
Many scale-ups regard nearshoring or outsourcing as a purely transactional matter. You provide a Jira ticket, they deliver a pull request. On paper, this is efficient. In practice, this model often does not take into account the complexity of the domain. Take the payment sector, where Rens has been building teams for Buckaroo for years. Payments aren't just about moving money; it's a web of interconnected systems, edge cases, and regulatory nuances. “It takes weeks to learn how to code,” Rens notes, “but it takes six to nine months to really get to know the company.”
If you rely solely on external agencies, that six-month investment in business logic leaves the property when the contract expires. This creates a knowledge gap. Every time a consultant rotates the project, a chunk of your company's institutional memory is erased. An internal team does retain that knowledge. They don't just build a checkout. They understand why a specific payment flow is important to your customer.
From them to us
One of the most profound changes made by Rens was the switch from hiring resources to building a dedicated international team. The transition from a software house customer to a global employer is not just a legal change. It's also a cultural one:
- Language as an inclusion tool: At Rens' company, internal communication was fully converted to English. It sounds like a small logistical bump, but for a developer in Kosovo, it's the difference between being a spectator and being a participant.
- Attention is the currency: You can't manage a high-performing team via Slack notifications alone. Rens explains how to fly to the team, understand their local culture, and engage them in high-level business goals — because “when you work with people, they want to be treated like yours.”
- Down with the black box mentality: If your developers don't know the reason behind a feature, they'll build exactly what you asked for — even if what you asked for is technically flawed. Rens explains that engagement creates “small ambassadors. It creates ownership, and people who feel they have ownership are much more motivated.”
Ownership in the Age of AI
We're entering an era where AI can generate code at a fraction of the cost of a human developer. Some argue that this makes internal teams less necessary, but the reality is quite the opposite. As code becomes a commodity, validation and ownership become the true added value. If AI writes 90% of your codebase, who will ensure that the architecture is sustainable? Who owns the intellectual property and long-term roadmap?
“You have to own your tools, code, and infrastructure yourself”
A company that doesn't understand its own tech stack is a company built on sand. An internal foundation, with people who are product-minded rather than task-oriented, ensures that your company is not left with unusable AI-generated code as technology evolves.
The financial case: ROI beyond the hourly rate
Although a digital agency's sticker price seems similar to an internal salary, the total cost of ownership tells a different story. If you take into account:
- Context switching: The time you spend explaining requirements to external parties.
- Refactoring costs: Repairing “quick-and-dirty” code two years later.
- Innovation ceiling: The inability to pivot quickly because you are stuck with a permanent contract.
... the internal model wins consistently in the long run. Internal teams make more sustainable growth possible: developers can suggest a feature you didn't know was possible because they understand business goals better than the product owner.
The hybrid path
So does every scale-up have to open an internal office in Kosovo tomorrow? No. But every scale-up must decide where their technical heart beats. The choice between agencies, freelancers and internal teams is not just a budgetary one. It's also a strategic decision about where your company's intelligence lives. Digital Agencies are great for speed and specialized peaks. But for a company's long-term growth, that intelligence must be internal.
When developers feel part of the “we,” they stop writing code alone and start solving business problems. And in 2026, that's the way to stay ahead.
