| I actually own a studio that does just this. I think that for a lot of businesses, they can hire internal developers prematurely before they have a clear vision of the product that they're building or need. We structured our studio as a group of (very) senior talent, most with over a decade of experience each across Product Design, Software Engineering, and Product Management, where thee entirety of our studio is available on each project. We focus on documentation, developer experience, and working with companies to get the initial product in a state of both product management and cleanliness to ensure that they're reading to onboard specific team members internally to carry the product forward. It can be very cost prohibitive to create a new product without having designers, developers, product owners, all that are dedicated to your vision. A developer may miss key user experience interactions, making it difficult to use. A designer may forgot key features from a business perspective. Having access to all of the talent for a new product is hard. As others have said here, I recommend finding very talented and experienced SENIOR Engineers. If you are intent on them being an internal team, ensure they have excellent project management skills and have built their own side project from scratch, so they know what it takes to build a full product from the ground up. An engineer that builds their own products has experience that is invaluable when it comes to building functional tools that people want to use. |