Six questions to ask any development partner before you sign

The overlap question

“Do you work in our timezone?” is the wrong question, because nobody says no. Ask instead: how many hours of guaranteed overlap, with which named people, and what actually happens in those hours.

Overlap that exists only on paper is worse than none at all, because you plan around it. We put the names and the window into the contract for exactly that reason, and we would tell you to demand the same from anyone else you are evaluating.

Who actually writes the code

The most common failure in outsourced development is that the people in the pitch are not the people who build the thing. It is rarely deliberate; a studio wins more work than it planned for and the senior people get spread across it.

Ask directly: will the person on this call write code on my project, and what percentage of their week. Then ask for that answer in writing. A studio that will not commit to it is telling you something useful.

How disagreement works

Every client relationship that fails does so quietly first. Politeness turns into agreement that is not real, and by the time anyone says the uncomfortable thing there is a month of work built on it.

Ask how disagreement is surfaced, and ask for an example. Our answer is that every proposal has a section titled “what we think you are wrong about”. It is uncomfortable to write and it has saved several projects. Whatever the mechanism, there should be one.

Contracts and IP

Get intellectual property assigned in writing at the point of payment, not at the end of the project. Get the repository under your own organisation from the first commit, with the studio as a collaborator rather than the owner.

Then ask the question nobody enjoys: what happens to the code if this relationship ends badly. If the honest answer requires a conversation rather than a clause, that is the answer.

What happens when it slips

Every project of any size slips somewhere. What matters is whether you find out in week three or week nine.

Ask what the reporting rhythm is, what a slipped milestone triggers, and who tells you. A studio that has never had a project slip is either very new or not being straight with you.

The reference call

Ask to speak to a client in a comparable sector, and ask for it unbriefed. The value of a reference is entirely in whether the studio had time to prepare them.

The three questions worth asking that client: what went wrong, how was it handled, and would you hire them again for something harder. The second answer is the one that predicts your own experience.

If any of this is a live problem rather than an interesting read, say so. We would rather have a specific conversation than a general one.

— Sayan Saha, Founder