Now that you have selected your development agency, what’s the best way to work with them? They probably sold you on how great their process is and what they will offer you. You need to make sure you have and know the following in order to protect yourself and make sure your product gets to market. One thing to note, you should be very hands on. After all, this is your company and product. No one should care about it more. You should test, provide feedback and be willing to roll your sleeves up (no matter how much you pay a company). Our time working with project management at Reliablebits.io has taught us innumerable insights into this process
Onboarding
First things first, you need to have an onboarding and handoff tool in place and defined. We recommend using Braindump. All the companies we work with use it and it’s really the only thing on the market. For a flat price its well worth the investment, you will know your stack, credentials, and documentation all in one place. Remember the dev agency is just is not your end goal or longer term solution, they are your solution right now.
Project Management
Ok what else? You need to make sure that you have a project management tool in place. We recommend using Trello. It’s lightweight, flexible and great on mobile. Make sure once you have a project management tool that you check it every few days or so to see progress. Note that development takes time so you may see a ticket in the In-Progress state for a few days, don’t be alarmed this is normal.
Code
Use a code repository. This will likely be Github. The agency will probably not push code to the repo but make sure that your agency is using one so that when you do your final payment and it’s time for you and your new team to take over the code you can easily get it without a hassle.
Lastly, there is no such thing as perfect. As a child we are raised to be perfectionists, however in the business world there is no such thing. In your mind good enough is better than perfect. Get your product in front of customers as quickly as possible. Don’t get bogged down with the little things. Think about what your core experience is and if the agency has satisfied then get it to launch.
Real talk: We’ve seen too many folks (admittedly, we’ve been guilty of it ourselves) not launch because Their product never was perfect and ended up wasting extra months to get it “just’ right to then cut the feature in the future. You just need to get it out in the work and a great agency will really push that narrative.
Don’t be scared that when you pay your last invoice the agency will run away. Most will do the right thing and help you find a developer or make minor edits for free.