As in life itself, there are relationships that do not prosper no matter how hard we try to make them work. There are technological partners of all kinds and it can happen that you associate with one that finally did not develop the project as you expected or did not obtain the product you had in mind.
Every company must be prepared to face the consequences of choosing the wrong partner, but we want to reassure you with our own experience: this failure is not the end of the world and you can always start the search for a new partner from scratch, learning from the inconveniences of the past to make better choices in the future.
What if I choose the wrong technology partner?
We draw on our experience to alert you to what can happen when choosing the wrong technology partner:
You do not have the technical capacity to meet the demand of your customers
I put it simply: if you hired a partner to develop a virtual store for your brand of vitamin supplements and in the middle of the project it gives you more problems than positive results, then you will be facing a deficit of technical capacity to meet the demand for products from customers.
What does this mean? That the competition can take advantage of that gap in your service to "steal" those customers since they will be offering them what you cannot due to technical problems. This is the worst thing that could happen to your brand, since this generates a bad user experience and influences the image that customers have of the brand. Reputation can totally fall apart.
The partner must know how to react and process user demands to transform them into logical and achievable technological solutions. Bottom line: it has to give you options to solve moments of crisis during development. For this reason, the previous experience of a partner is highly valued since it is a guarantee that they will have all the technical expertise to overcome the challenges that arise in development, without stalling the tasks.
So erring with a technology partner means a very valuable waste of time for your company, which translates into delays in ongoing projects, loss of budget and, if that were not enough, it generates distrust in customers regarding the performance of the brand. That is why we insist on the importance of evaluating the partner's profile very well before joining him.
The product does not respond to the needs of the end customer
Continuing with the example of the virtual supplement store: even if the project is technically complete if the partner mishandled the software development, it is possible that the final product does not meet the needs of the company or those of the end-user.
It is one of the worst scenarios: going through all the development and all that it implies to finally have a product that does not fit what you want is disappointing. It is devastating to lose investment, time, and patience.
In these cases, the work is twofold, since it is necessary to find a new technology partner to analyze the finished product, diagnose the errors and make the corresponding fixes, or to restart the project from scratch to build a new product.
The budget can get out of control
Something that happens a lot if the priorities and scope of the project are not clear to you is excessive spending, exceeding the initial budget. This is definitely one of the scenarios that companies try to avoid, especially if the budget is already limited.
If the partner is not clear on how they will execute the tasks in the plan or what resources they need to complete them, the budget can spiral out of control at any stage of development. For example, if the partner starts the development with two front-end and two back-end experts and after a few weeks it comes out that he needs two more for each area -without being contemplated in the plan- he will obviously increase the investment without having foreseen it from the beginning.
To avoid these situations, a responsible partner must present a realistic cost structure, which considers each of the tasks and associated costs, also anticipating possible drawbacks during development and how much would be spent solving them.
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