The six engineering models we run — Staff Augmentation, Dedicated Teams, ODC, GCC, BOT and Managed Engineering Teams — sound like a spectrum of scale, and to some extent they are. But the more useful way to choose between them isn't size. It's how much operational ownership you actually want to carry.
Staff Augmentation and Dedicated Teams both leave you owning the operational layer — process, tooling, day-to-day management — and differ mainly in continuity. An Offshore Development Center hands you a functioning unit with its own governance, at the cost of a longer setup. A Global Capability Center is organization design, not staffing, and should be evaluated on leadership structure and retention strategy, not headcount cost per engineer.
The mistake we see most often isn't picking the wrong model outright — it's picking the right model for the wrong stage. A Dedicated Team forced into a Staff Augmentation contract structure creates constant renegotiation friction. A GCC ambition run like a short-term hire never gets the leadership investment it needs to retain people past year one.
The practical fix is simple: name the operational ownership you actually want to carry before you name the model. If the honest answer is “none of it, just outcomes,” you're describing Managed Engineering Teams, whatever the RFP calls it.