What's one non-obvious challenge you've faced when your product suddenly needs expertise in something outside your core team's wheelhouse (AI features, complex backend scaling, mobile parity, etc.)?

Yeah, that kind of thing can really sneak up on you. In my last gig we pushed to scale our backend fast after a viral campaign spiked traffic out of nowhere—turns out the non-obvious pain was all the subtle race conditions and caching inconsistencies that only popped under real load, not in our staging tests. It wasn't just about adding servers; it messed with how we debugged everything. Sometimes bringing in syndicode dedicated software developers made sense for us because they could jump in with exactly the scaling know-how we lacked internally, without us having to hire full-time and pray the ramp-up worked. Kept things moving without derailing the whole product roadmap. Just my two cents—outsourcing bits like that isn't always the answer, but when your team's stretched thin on unfamiliar territory, it can feel like a lifesaver instead of a compromise.