A lot of people out there are going through their start-up journey, building a product from scratch, and have never gone into tech before. They are either working with a team locally or overseas. We’ve seen a lot of success stories working with teams all over the world, and we’ve seen a lot of failures.
The main problem seems to be communication.
Now the big question is, Is your team communicating with you well?
A lot of problems tend to come from you being a non-tech founder in a start-up trying to build a tech-based product. Jumping into a software development project is daunting and complicated and you might feel like things are over your head at the moment.
There’s a lot to learn to understand if a tech team is building you the right technology and what they’re saying is real. If they start communicating poorly, it just exaggerates that problem and makes it so much worse for your organization.
You really need to be on top of your team!
Micromanage them won’t work, but you want to be in constant communication. You want to make sure that they’re understanding what you’re telling them. If you explain something to them and they can’t explain it back to you then they haven’t understood it well enough.
That’s one form of miscommunication where they’ll start doing things that they assume are correct and start taking your project down the wrong path and waste time and effort.
But you also need constant updates. If they haven’t got a communication plan in place to give you weekly or fortnightly updates and keep you up to date then there’s no process for deviations to deadlines when things go wrong.
Do you even know that things are going wrong?
Or Do you even know in which phase the project is?
Or Do you even know in what language the project is?
You need answers to these questions and you need to be on top of your project in order to make this process smoother. If they’re not happy to provide updates to you and work with you in this way, you might have the wrong team.
If your team says “alright, we will take your project today, and we won’t speak to you for 3-months and we’ll be in touch when we have any questions”.
I would say that’s a giant RED FLAG and would advise you to walk away from that situation straight away.
It doesn’t matter how cheap they are or how good they are.
If they can’t communicate with you they certainly are going to build you the wrong thing and then all you’re going to be doing is wasting your time and money on something that you won’t be able to use. We have seen it countless times, but people just keep doing it. They don’t know that they’re going through the wrong situation, and they develop the wrong product.
Communication is the key to any project. Effective communication is even more critical in the development space where things are custom made. Many elements are plugged together for you because just one assumption can change the entire direction.
