What should you give a dev shop before they start building?

I once worked with a founder whose Jira tickets included requirements like: "Fix the issue."

This is an extreme example, but it reflects the broader problem. The development shop was being asked to build and change the product with very little documentation explaining what it should do, how a user should experience it, or what the founder expected to see when the work came back.

The dev shop still made a change to the product. They had a timeline and a set of tickets, so when something wasn't clear, they made an assumption and kept moving.

That's the risk with vague requirements. Ambiguity doesn't stop development. It just means someone else has to make the decision.

And when you're working with an external development team, they are making the decision without all the context you have about your business, your customers, and the product you have in your head.

Sometimes they'll guess correctly. When they don't, you can end up paying for the assumption once when they build it and again when they have to rebuild it.

Be specific about what the product needs to do

There's an important distinction between telling engineers what you need and telling them how to build it.

The technology choices, architecture, and implementation approach belong with the engineering team. What I want to make clear is how the product is expected to behave and what the user needs to be able to accomplish.

Take something as seemingly straightforward as a calendar.

Saying "users need a calendar" leaves a surprising amount unanswered. Does more than one person need access to it? Does it need to sync with Outlook? Can users create recurring meetings? What happens when an event changes? Who can edit it?

Those aren't technical details. They're product decisions, and if they matter to the customer experience, the development team shouldn't have to guess at them.

At the same time, being precise about the expected outcome doesn't mean being prescriptive about the solution.

Years ago, I was working on building a mobile-first mutual fund screener. I had a clear vision of how I thought the tool should work and how the results should appear. One of the developers looked at it and suggested a different technical approach that would create a much better experience, particularly on mobile.

He built a quick version so I could react to it, and — candidly — it was A LOT better than what I had envisioned.

That is exactly what I want from an engineering partner. I want to be clear about the problem, the requirements, and the intended experience, then give engineers room to bring their own expertise to the solution.

A prototype helps make the vision concrete

When I prepare work for a development team, I generally hand over both written requirements and a clickable prototype because they communicate different things.

Written requirements help capture functionality, rules, edge cases, and expectations that aren't always obvious from looking at a screen. A prototype makes the experience more tangible. Instead of trying to explain an entire workflow in words, the team can click through it and understand how the pieces are supposed to connect.

But I'm also explicit that the prototype is not a set of instructions that needs to be reproduced pixel for pixel.

On a recent client project, I had incorporated AI into part of a new customer contact flow I had prototyped. The development team came back and said they didn't want to implement it that way.

That, of course, was fine. AI wasn't the requirement. The requirement was what the workflow needed to accomplish. The prototype gave us something concrete to react to. It helped the team understand what I was envisioning while still giving them room to say, "There's a better way to do this."

A clear handoff isn't the end of the job

But it's important to remember that even a detailed handoff doesn't eliminate misunderstandings. We're human, after all.

While documentation doesn't prevent misunderstanding, it does give the team a shared point of reference. We can compare what was built with what we had documented up front, identify the gap, and explain exactly what — if anything — needs to change.

That's also why I don't think founders should hand requirements to a dev shop, disappear for six weeks, and wait to see what comes back.

We should see the product as it develops. During demos, I'm looking at the user-facing experience and asking:

The point isn't to micromanage the build. It's to surface the questions and assumptions while there's still time to do something about them. A misunderstanding after a few days of work is usually much cheaper to fix than one discovered at the end of the project.

A dev shop's discovery process solves a different problem

Many good development shops offer their own discovery or scoping process, and that can absolutely be valuable. It can help turn a product direction into a technical plan, identify dependencies, estimate effort, and determine how different pieces should be built.

But technical discovery can only work with the product decisions you bring into the room.

If a workflow is still unclear, if you haven't decided which user gets access to what, or if an important business rule is unresolved, the scoping process doesn't magically make that decision disappear. Someone still has to decide what the product is supposed to do.

That's the piece I see founders underestimate.

The goal isn't to produce a giant specification that anticipates every possible question. It's to make the important product decisions explicit enough that your development team isn't unknowingly making them for you.

Turning product decisions into something a team can build

A big part of my work at Align Product Studio is helping founders do exactly that: turn what's in their heads into a clear product direction, clickable prototype, and written requirements that a development team can actually build from, then stay close enough to the build to catch gaps before they turn into expensive rework.

If you're getting ready to hand a product to a dev shop, or you're already in development and finding that what comes back isn't quite what you had in mind, here's more detail on how I work.

You won't eliminate every question or change along the way, nor should you expect to. The goal is to make sure the important product decisions are being made intentionally, not accidentally by whoever happens to be building the product.