What to validate first
Anyone can show a portfolio. What separates a partner from a vendor shows up in the first meetings, before any contract:
- Do they ask business questions, not only technical ones?
- Do they provide phased deliverables with acceptance criteria?
- Can they integrate CRM, channels, and current tools?
- Do they define support ownership after go-live?
“Every company is a software company.”
Satya Nadella
Red flags before signing
- No explicit assumptions or scope boundaries
- No clear plan for performance and security
- No operational KPI dashboard tied to business impact
- No realistic maintenance model
None of these is a technicality. Each one turns into money later: undefined scope becomes change requests, a missing security plan becomes an incident, and a vague maintenance model means paying twice for the same fix.
Execution discipline that matters
Look for 90-day roadmaps, sprint-level demos, measurable KPI reviews, and transparent trade-off decisions. A partner who shows you working software every couple of weeks is giving you an exit at every step; one who asks you to wait until the end is asking for trust they have not earned yet. That discipline is what turns technology into a durable business asset.
“What gets measured gets managed.”
Peter Drucker
Curious facts
- The discipline of “software engineering” owes its name to a 1968 NATO conference in Garmisch, Germany, convened because so many projects were late and over budget — a situation attendees called the “software crisis”.
- Conway's law, formulated by Mel Conway in 1968, observes that organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure. How a partner's team is organized will show up in your product's architecture.
- Developers call the number of people who could leave before a project stalls the “bus factor”. A partner where only one person understands your system has a bus factor of one.
- Goodhart's law — “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” — is a useful lens for judging any KPI dashboard a partner promises you.
- “Dogfooding” — using your own product internally — was popularized at Microsoft in 1988 after a manager's email referenced an Alpo dog-food ad campaign. Ask any partner whether they run on what they build.