Settling the relationship with your technology partner

When a decision is already taken on who the technological partner is, laying out the terms in a contract and cultivating a relationship is important, for both sides.

As the development is about to conclude, the technological partner will have something to show for. This means that the core coding is done and some visuals begin to function. It is most likely that the software will not be fully functioning, but that's because it is not ready yet.

The cycle shown above shows the process between the delivery to the non-technological founder and the delivery to market. The cycle can go around as many times as needed.

Last article it was mentioned that it is crucial for one to make sure the other areas of the business are in the same page as the development. Well, this is the time where operationally, you can be ahead of your time. As you have images, a sense of how it is really looking and a estimated delivery date with a safe buffer (better deliver earlier rather than later of a promise date) and a better idea of how it will really look and function, you can now begin to tease the users with a near implementation. Depending on who your target user is, this will allow you to either begin to pitch your solution to users if external or heat the conversations if internal.

From this moment, there are two one can take it's relationship with the technological partner. Despite the development not being ready, software developers need to plan themselves ahead of time in order to understand if they can begin to allocate workforce for upcoming projects or if the developers will continue working on your solution.

The image above shows the timeline between a technological and non technological founder. After the product is market-ready, the relationship may or may not continue upon your decision

Relation

As your relationship with your technological partner comes close to an end (if outsourcing was the option chosen), there are two ways to go from here:

One of the biggest issues with discontinuing the relationship with the technological founder is that some time of the non-technological team will need to be allocated to understanding how to maintain and run a software.

End of relationship

If the non-technological founder is satisfied with the solution and wish to store the app, some advising will need to be done so that the app maintain itself up and running. This is completely doable if one gets ahead on how to do so.

Continuity of relationship

Almost treating like a 'cost of insurance' to maintain the software running, software development companies usually work with two types of post-development contracts.
The first type of contract is a sustain contract. This means the non-technological partner pays a relatively small fee in order for the technological one to be responsible of maintaining the software running.
The second type of contract is a development contract. Usually offered in several prices, this contract is basically the maintenance of the one above, but it also counts with a number of hours of development as well. The price of the contract will be directly correlated with the amount of hours you would like the technological founder to devote on developing other functionalities and slowly adding to the MVP.