10 Questions to Ask Before Starting Your Development Project
You’re ready to kick off your project. You’re excited. Good. It should be exciting to build something new or fix something broken.
But…before we get ahead of ourselves, it’s important to get a bit introspective and ask yourself a few questions.
This list of questions is based on the pre-discovery framework we use here at Above The Fray. It represents the ideal information we’d love all the merchants we work with to know and provide before starting on a new development project.
Don’t panic if you don’t have all the answers just yet. Read through these questions, and we will help you get there.
1) What problem are you actually trying to solve?
You don’t just “need a new website.” Let’s dig a little deeper.
- Have you identified the real pain you, your team, or your customers are feeling that led to this moment?
- Is your customer service team at the end of their ropes? Holding customers’ hands through every single transaction because the UX is so bad?
- Is your team manually uploading spreadsheets every day to sync up systems?
A development project is not cheap. You need to have a concrete idea of the problem you need to solve before swinging hammers.
Now, if you know there’s a need and you’re struggling to define it, it is worth finding a development partner who can help you through this deconstruction. We’ve done this with many of our clients during the discovery process—it helps us better understand the business, and helps you avoid making costly investments too soon.
2) Who’s calling the shots?
We love a steering committee as much as the next guy.
But if in reality, there’s one person whose opinion is critical to move things forward and that one person will not be readily available for this project, you may need to hold off. On the flip side, you also don’t want to wait on a team of 12 to come to a consensus on every single decision.
Finding yourself in a holding pattern on a development project can get expensive fast. We promise that you don’t want to be tying up developers without work to do.
It’s best to have an internal stakeholder who can keep the ball moving forward.
If that person doesn’t exist, let us know up front. We’re no strangers in helping to identify the right stakeholders or recommend an approval process that keeps everyone informed while moving work forward. It’s better to do this exercise at the start instead of blindly seeking support late into a project’s lifecycle.
3) What’s your budget, really?
You might not know at the start of your project, when requirements are still being firmed up, what your budget should be. But at some point, you’ll have to establish that number so your internal team and agency can work within it.
Again, we’ll be honest about whether or not it’s enough to do the must-haves on your priority list.
4) What’s your timeline?
Good things take time! Web development is no different.
Any agency that tells you it will build you a custom site in a matter of weeks is lying to you. Implementations can take anywhere from 2 months to 12 months, including discovery, design, build, and launch – and a high percentage of these take around 8 months, all-in. It can range quite a bit depending on the complexity of the project.
If you have your heart set on launching by a specific date, there are usually ways for us to carve out a functional MVP and then complete the rest of the project as a fast follow phase 2.
5) Are you looking for a partner or a vendor?
If you are looking for a vendor to take orders and execute tasks, that’s not us.
We’ve found that the best project results happen when we have trust, collaboration, and room to challenge each other. We thrive when we get to dive deep into a merchant’s businesses to really understand their goals and challenges, and from there, we architect a solution that really makes it better.
No shade on order takers. It’s just not the type of partnership we strive for.
6) What things are non-negotiable - and are they really not negotiable?
We want to hear your whole wishlist and help make all those dreams come true. But it’s critical that we know the difference between your wants and your needs.
It will impact everything from platform selection and integration recommendations to the timeline and budget. We can’t effectively consult on your MVP build without honing in on the must-haves and a prioritized list of nice-to-haves.
7) Where are the landmines?
Every development project has risks—we’re not afraid of those. The scary thing is acting like risks don’t exist; that’s how they get you.
Having a good grasp of where the landmines are likely buried helps prevent disaster.
- Know your data is in bad shape
- Have an ancient ERP that’s been modified to meet your business needs with duct tape and bubble gum for the last 15 years?
Those are good things to mention at the start of the project so we can be on the lookout for additional risks in those areas and adjust the timeline accordingly.
8) How will you define success?
There’s no single KPI that we look at to determine success.
On-time and on-budget are definitely up there. But if we turn over a finished build that doesn’t do what you wanted, the gold stars for good management are moot.
This goes back to Question 1: fully understanding the problem you are trying to solve and then determining how to measure it.
Part of the discovery process with merchants involves establishing these success KPIs and the baseline for those metrics at the start of our engagement so we can clearly showcase our wins.
9) Can you see the ripple?
Changing one thing ultimately causes other things to change. A ripple effect.
Will this development project cause changes to any existing people, processes, or technologies that are difficult to cope with? Start thinking through the plan to mitigate those impacts.
10) What’s the plan for after launch?
Development projects are almost never something you can set and forget. You’ll need a plan for ongoing maintenance, security, and feature updates—and don’t forget marketing.
It would be a real shame to invest all that money in building something and not drive traffic to it. That’s why we work with merchants post-launch to drive qualified traffic to their new sites so that they can see a faster ROI.
Better Questions = Better Results
We’ve been doing this for a long time and have found that these questions are really the difference between a project running smoothly or turning into an over-budget, overdue, overcomplicated mess.
Agencies that dodge these questions? 🚩
Merchants who don’t want to answer them? 🚩🚩
If both sides aren’t willing to discuss the meat of this stuff at the start, you can expect the project to be riddled with trouble.
If you’re on the hunt for a partner who tells it like it is, helps you navigate the risks, and actually cares about making it better, we’re here. No fluff, no hidden gotchas, just good work and good people.
Let’s chat.
