X-Team

Hybrid working done right isn't about picking a number of days everyone needs to be in the office. It's about giving people the freedom to get their work done in the right place in the right time for them. “The way to get control,” says Dan Bladen, CEO of Kadence, “is to have your business perform really well. Just backwards-engineer the best environment for that.”

Selecting among IT staff augmentation companies is an operating model decision. The vendor you choose determines how developers are vetted, how they onboard, how communication holds over time and how long people stay. Get those fundamentals right and the team compounds. Get them wrong and you're cycling through replacements every six months.

Your executives think your AI talent strategy is working. Your engineers don’t. X-Team surveyed 324 U.S. technology and business leaders on AI talent readiness in 2026. The biggest gap in the entire study wasn’t by industry, org size, or budget. It was by job level. Executives report 92% confidence sourcing AI-capable talent. Individual contributors doing the work: 29%.

Self-assessment measures confidence, not capability — and Ignis AI’s data shows the gap is bigger than most leaders think. This matters for any engineering org using self-reported skills to make staffing, development, or team assembly decisions.

Most people think they have a pretty good idea of what thay are capable of at work. What if they're wrong? In this week's newsletter, we're highlighting Gemma E. Versace's recent conversation with Dustin Clinard on the Keep Moving Forward podcast as they explore the consequences of making talent decisions based on unreliable data and why the Ignis team decided to focus on developing skill profiles based on scenario-based observation rather than self-reporting.

Dan Bladen is not a fan of the word "hybrid". "I don't have many great hybrid things in my life," he says. "If I've got a hybrid washer-dryer, it's not great. If I've got a hybrid sofa bed, it's not great either." So what should we be talking about instead? Find out in this week's Keep Moving Forward newsletter.

Working with offshore software development companies gives you access to engineering talent you can't hire locally, at rates you can't match at home, and the flexibility to scale up or down quickly.

Gemma E. Versace was on the Punk Rock HR podcast this week to talk about what X-Team's research found when we asked 300+ leaders how AI is going at their organizations. Executives and engineers are not living in the same reality. The episode gets into why that gap exists... and who's positioned to close it. Check out the conversation!

In an enterprise org championing AI transformation, the question isn't "Do we have the tech/money/resources?" It's "Do our people trust themselves, each other, and the systems we've put in place to use it effectively?"

Staff aug isn't just about speed when it comes to AI readiness.