How to Choose a Software Development Partner: 9 Questions to Ask
The pitch meeting won't tell you what you need to know. Nine questions that separate development partners from vendors — and how to read the answers.
Sana Qureshi
Product Lead
Every software vendor has a great pitch. The ones who deliver have answers to awkward questions. The ones who don't also have answers — they're just rehearsed. Here's the question set we recommend clients ask every firm, including us.
The nine questions
- Who will I actually work with day to day, and how senior are they?
- What did the last project like mine cost, in time and money?
- What goes wrong in your projects, and how do you recover?
- How do you handle scope changes after the proposal is signed?
- Who owns the code, and what happens if we part ways?
- How do you report progress — demos, dashboards, or promises?
- Can I talk to a client from a similar project, without a salesperson present?
- What do you do when you're wrong about an estimate?
- Why would you turn down a project?
How to read the answers
Good partners answer with specifics and examples — projects, names, numbers. They admit past failures because they know they'll be discovered anyway. They can name the projects they declined and why. Vague answers about process are process-shaped marketing.
The proposal test
Ask for a fixed-price proposal and watch what happens. Serious partners will want a discovery phase before committing to numbers — that's the mark of engineering honesty. Firms that quote blind fast are quoting insurance, not work.
You're not buying code. You're buying judgment under uncertainty. Ask questions that test judgment, not portfolios.