Betting on Offshore
Scenario
Tabcorp is a world-class wagering and entertainment group with a large and growing digital operation. At a time when onshore hiring was slow and expensive, Tabcorp needed a way to scale delivery capacity quickly — without sacrificing quality or creating a two-tier team culture.
The Challenge
Tabcorp's previous offshore partner had stopped working for them and they needed a fast, trusted replacement. With Pragmateam already embedded at Tabcorp, they approached us to set up a new offshore team. The brief from both sides was clear: it had to be done the right way. The motivation was flex capacity and speed of scale — not cost arbitrage. Economic benefits would be a consequence, not the goal.
Our Approach
Pragmateam set up a dedicated offshore team and brought them onshore for an intensive onboarding period. Rather than placing them in one area, we deliberately split them across Tabcorp's different tribes — so each person built relationships across the full breadth of the organisation they'd need to lean on once working remotely. By the time they left, they had context, established relationships, a clear backlog and the foundation to work as a self-sufficient unit.
From there, a regular travel cadence became a cornerstone of the model. Every time new work was kicked off or discovered, offshore team members came onshore to understand the work in context before taking it back. That investment in travel paid off many times over — it kept the team aligned, embedded in the culture and genuinely part of the organisation rather than a remote supplier.
Over three years, the team delivered across four distinct product areas inside Tabcorp. They built deep domain knowledge that onshore colleagues would come to them to tap into — not because they had to, but because the offshore team had simply been around long enough to know how things worked. Disciplined ways of working weren't optional for a distributed team; they were a necessity. The offshore team developed and maintained them rigorously, and it showed in their delivery.
A standout moment came when Tabcorp ran a hackathon exclusively with the offshore team. Working in pairs, they developed product feature ideas which were presented to Tabcorp's leadership. The winning idea was selected, the whole team built it, and it was live in production within six weeks.
“I’ve worked with Pragmateam over the past few years in multiple aspects from transforming our delivery practices to upskilling our engineering team and everything in between.
Finding partners that do the work is easy, Pragmateam adds a lasting legacy to your culture and that is hard to find.”
The Impact
Offshore team delivered successfully across four different product areas over three years
Delivery efficiency matched — and at times exceeded — that of onshore teams
Team became deeply embedded in Tabcorp's domain, culture and ways of working
Hackathon-winning feature idea taken from concept to production in six weeks
Demonstrated that offshore done right is a strategic capability, not a cost play
