Looking for development partners greatly impacts your dream project, so being picky about who to partner and invest in your project with is fairly critical. Setting up meetings with a lot of prospects may be a bit tedious. Make sure you have everything you need when you sit down with these busy people.
LANEX, having experienced being a development partner ourselves, we’ve narrowed down the needs and minimized hiccups upfront by following these tips we’ve shared with our clients:
Prepped Comprehensive Documentation About the Product to be Built or Improved
When a prospective client starts reaching out to us through discovery calls, we usually request a high-level run-through of the project or product to build. Our clients laid out their intentions by providing us with a structured feature list and ideas. They give us also the project ahead of time, their business models, and revenue streams. This will clearly define the problem that this digital product aims to solve. Our prospective clients will either discuss the timeline of expectations or plotted out in a comprehensive document. With this, we are able to frame boundaries and minimize cost estimation.
Define the Project and the Problem
In estimating project timelines and costs, development partners usually need to understand the type of project they will potentially need to work on upfront. A lot of these questions may revolve around building the project from scratch. Potentially, revising a 3-year-old codebase that may need a lot of fixing and improvement, or any current third-party integration. This may or may not entail a cost for any additional cloud platform or storage that needs to be added as an improvement.
Share Institutional Knowledge as The Expert In Your Field or As The Stakeholder
The tech development partners you are trying to interview may be the best in their field but you have to remember that you are the best in your field. To relay what you want as an expert in your own company, sharing institutional knowledge with your prospective tech partner allows them to understand and minimize risk as they progress in developing your dream project.
Qualifying Partners
Prior to the discovery call with clients, we prepare a few qualifying questions, a few of which are as follows:
- What problem is this product trying to solve? What’s not working?
- What’s working?
- Are we looking at a specific timeline?
- Do you have a budget range or set?
- Who are our closest competitors? Any inspiration platforms you’d like to share with us as a baseline?
Your Take Away
It’s ideal to provide an initial document of project requirements with mock-ups, flow charts, or prototypes. This is to make sure your tech development partner jump-starts your project. Having a vague idea isn't a problem since development partners provide consulting services where they can walk through the process.
