How to be a Rock Star at Communicating with Your Dev Team

Previously we’ve talked about what it takes to have a successful project. Today we want to dive deep on some of the communication skills that will help your project be a success. Whether you’re going with fixed-bid or time and materials, both our team and yours will need to be on the same page.

Be Responsive

Time is money! If we have a question for you, the sooner we hear back from you, the sooner we can deliver the solution. If you’re doing a fixed-bid project with us, the bulk of our communication, back and forth, asking and answering questions will be during your Project Road Mapping (previously we called this the Discovery Phase). If you’re doing a time and materials project with us, we will be reaching out to you consistently throughout the lifetime of your project with questions and updates. It’s important to be responsive. Even if you know that you won’t be able to get back to us that day or that week, send us a quick reply so we can move onto other tickets and other user stories in the meantime.

Be Aware

We try to be as transparent as possible with you throughout the lifetime of your project. With fixed-bid this will usually be right at the juncture between milestones, giving you updates on the latest deployment and reviewing what we’re doing next. With time and materials, you have the opportunity to be a part of daily standups on Slack and weekly checkins with your project manager. We also provide detailed reports with every invoice of what all our team members were working on each day. If you would like, you can have access to our project management tool to see live our team’s progress on your app. We absolutely believe that us being as transparent as possible is only to the benefit of your app, so you can feel confident that we are being productive, and you can have the opportunity to ask questions or pivot your goals at any point.

Be Consistent

We will give you as much or as little information as you need or want. For some clients, they prefer to be involved every step of the way. Other clients want to simply be able to decide on their app and trust us to get it done. Either way, consistency about how much communication you want from us is really helpful! There have been times when we have been tooling along, knocking out work, while a client may have been more focused on other aspects of their business — and rightfully so! You all are busy growing and building your companies! –, but then may realize that they feel very out-of touch with what’s been going on. We would love to meet with you and catch you up on all the details, but please keep in mind that we have been doing our best to put all the information in front of you. We never try to hide the work we do.

Whether you work with an outside team like Bixly’s or an internal team of programmers, these tips will help you and help your team stay on the same page, avoid frustration, and be productive from day one to delivery! If this type of transparency, flexibility, and honesty is what you are looking for from a development firm, don’t hesitate to reach out!