Most software projects struggle not because of the technology used or the quality of the team, but because of a wrong decision made at the very beginning.

The most common pattern we see starts with a well-intentioned reflex: “Let’s just start building as soon as possible.” Teams enter the software development process before critical decisions are truly clear.

This reflex usually comes from good intentions. No one wants to lose time, fall behind competitors, or delay turning an idea into reality. However, rushed decisions rarely accelerate a project. Instead, they often lead to serious slowdowns and cost increases later on.

In this article, we examine the fundamental points that should be clarified before hiring a software development team, based on patterns distilled from real project experience.

Why do software projects become difficult before they even start?

In many projects, problems only become visible months after development has started.

At first, everything seems fine: meetings are held, screens are designed, code is written. Then, at some point, familiar sentences begin to surface:

  • “This is not what we had in mind.”
  • “This doesn’t actually solve our real problem.”
  • “We should have approached this differently from the start.”

At this stage, the problem is not technical. The real issue is that the right questions were not asked early enough.

1. What problem are we actually trying to solve?

In many projects, what gets described is a solution idea, not the underlying problem.

“Let’s build a mobile app” or “We need to create a system” is not a problem definition.

We usually start with a different question:

What are you currently doing manually, where do you lose time, and at which point do you lose control without this software?

When projects start without a clearly defined problem:

  • the scope keeps changing
  • new requirements are added after the fact
  • a perception gap forms between the team and the business

This gradually wears the project down, both in terms of time and budget.

2. Is software development really the right step for this problem?

The question here is not “Is there an off-the-shelf tool?”

The real question is:

Are we at the right point to invest time, budget, and focus into custom software development for this problem?

In some cases, the problem is real, but the solution is not yet software development.

For example:

  • the process is still unclear
  • user behavior is not well understood
  • expectations keep changing

In such cases, jumping directly into development does not resolve uncertainty; it simply embeds uncertainty into code.

Starting software development at the wrong time can be costly, even when the idea itself is valid.

3. What are we deliberately choosing not to build in the first phase?

What often saves projects is not the list of things to build, but the list of things deliberately left out.

Every item labeled “We’ll add it later”:

  • affects the architecture from day one
  • makes technical decisions heavier
  • silently increases cost

A common pattern we see is this:

Decisions that are not critical for the first version but are kept “just in case” reduce flexibility from the very beginning.

This makes the following question critical early on:

Which needs are we consciously leaving out in the first phase?

4. How will we define success?

The fact that software works does not automatically mean it is successful.

Success is measured against goals defined at the start.

In the first phase, is the goal to:

  • learn something?
  • observe user behavior?
  • test sales assumptions?
  • relieve an operational process?

If this is not clear, teams often finish the project with different definitions of success.

This leads to the familiar situation where “the project is done, but no one is satisfied.”

5. What is the cost of getting the start wrong?

Wrong starts rarely fail immediately.

Problems surface months later, when changing direction becomes very expensive.

Poor early decisions:

  • lock the architecture
  • make further development harder
  • increase the cost of every future change

That is why reviewing decisions before starting development is often more critical than development itself.

If these points are not clear, choosing a focused evaluation before committing to development is usually the safest long-term path.

At this stage, many teams realize that trying to answer these questions alone isn’t always the healthiest approach. Talking through assumptions with a different perspective often prevents the kind of costly mistakes that come from unclear decisions.