When Sean Harrington, now VP of Product at Teamworks, served as Director of Software Engineering for the New England Patriots, he saw firsthand how much time and money was needed to build specialized solutions, integrate them with hardware, and migrate the data. 

Harrington recently shared key insights and lessons he learned during his time leading an in-house software engineering team.

“We spent a million dollars a year on human resources,” Harrington said. “We used about half our time building our bespoke integrations with hardware products and applications that cleaned that data and made sure it was in a format that could be used by decision-makers.” 

That meant that the Patriots were spending around $500,000 annually to integrate, clean, and migrate data.

Harrington shared two different three-month project examples during his session, one of which “never saw the light of day”, to further highlight the benefit of pairing an off-the-shelf solution with in-house expertise in order to avoid the time and money investment on commoditized work for your club.

“The stance I’m not taking is that we can replace software engineering with bespoke vendors,” Harrington said. “What [Teamworks] can do is keep building these integrations out and tying all this data into one athlete, so [in-house] software teams can use it to build proprietary tools that give their club a competitive advantage.” 

Hear Harrington’s perspective on how a build AND buy strategy can be the right differentiator for elite sports organizations.

To learn how Teamworks AMS can support your in-house solution to deliver superior value to your organization, contact us today.