Developing software is not a simple task and that is why it is absolutely necessary to have a suitable ally to build your product or assist you in improving your processes.

If you are a CEO, COO or an entrepreneur, I am sure that at some point you have considered or needed to involve a software company to help you improve / optimize a process or, if you are an entrepreneur, assist you to build that product that will allow you to obtain your desired financial freedom.


You've probably heard scary stories about how mean can developers be, so you want to be sure you won't make an investment that you will never get back; either because they didn't finish your project or they didn't deliver what you needed. Starting from there is precisely from where we have written this publication. Finding the right partner is not easy; However, below I give you useful tips to consider when selecting your strategic partner for software product development.

1. Choose someone who wants to understand your project before submitting a quote

There is no sense to have a price for something that neither you nor anyone who intends to help you know what it is. The number 1 enemy of a software project is the inability to communicate between project participants. Not using a validation tool to capture requirements is a sure route to failure.
When you are hiring a software company, see if it tries to understand your business and the problems that affect it. Pay close attention if your partner considers, as they cannot size the project with a single conversation, that a discovery assessment should be done to help create inputs that allow a conversation about the product to be built.

This company is defending your investment and protecting you from a sea of problems and costs at the end of the day. Yes, you will have to invest to know what product you want to build; but this is not bad. In the software industry, a problem found in the requirements or discovery stage is 100 times less expensive than in the production stage. The premise is simple: When is it easier to correct the problem of a house, before construction or once you have all the walls and ceilings?

Building software is a complex engineering job. Changes due to lack of knowledge of the scope mean that almost 50% of software projects in the world do not see the light at the end of the road; because the projects are canceled or simply cost 200 or 300 times more than the original estimate.

2. Perform a detailed process about how to build your product

As I said earlier, building software is a complex engineering job. Therefore, having a proven execution process is very important. In the software industry, improvisation is bad. Below are some questions that will allow you to evaluate important aspects of your software partner's practice and processes.

Can you describe a sequence of steps, fluently, with which your software product will be delivered?
How are changes to requirements going to be handled?

How often will you receive feedback on the process development?
Does the team frequently evaluate its performance and do self-evaluations as the project progresses?

3. Be able to deliver a detailed work plan of how your product will be built

For all your projects, and especially your software projects, it is necessary to have a command of project management as well as risk management. A software team has to have the ability to produce, execute and monitor a work plan to build its product.

What things should you take into account to be able to tell if this is something your supplier has? Some basic questions below.
What is the critical path of your project?
Have you divided your project into milestones?
During execution, do you use metrics like CPI and SPI?

Will it be a permanent and frequent results presentation session?
If you hire high quality professional software developers, they will care about knowing the processes that they will optimize, what are the problems that generate them and accompany its client in the process of identifying if the proposed solution is the correct one or if there are other options.

On the other hand, they make sure to say yes to entrepreneurs who approach them when they are at the right stage to develop. In their day to day, they guide entrepreneurs to study their business and develop plans, this is the only way that will allow them to be successful in their undertaking. Sometimes there are very good ventures but they do not have the legal basis to be able to execute it and this is a lack of research as well as development of the aforementioned plan.