How to vet a development agency

Polished answers are cheap. 'What's your process?' gets a diagram. 'Will you hit the deadline?' gets a confident yes. Neither tells you much. When you vet a development agency, the useful signal is not whether they have answers. It is whether their answers have edges.

Ask about scope before process

A weak answer is a methodology name. A strong answer describes a habit: before anyone writes code, you agree on a scope document that says what ships, what does not, and what happens when you change your mind. The document matters less than the discipline behind it: cutting a feature in week one is free, cutting it in week nine costs a month.

Ask what 'done' means

This is the question that separates real teams from demo teams. 'Done' should mean in production, observed, and reversible, with a test for the failure mode that matters. If the answer is 'the code compiles and we hand over the repo,' you are buying a prototype at product prices.

Ask who you will actually work with

The senior people in the pitch meeting are not always the people who build your product. Ask who writes the code, who reviews it, and what happens when that person is sick. Small teams are not a red flag; invisible teams are.

Ask how they say no

Most projects hit a moment where the honest answer is 'that is out of scope' or 'that deadline is not real.' An agency that never says no is not protecting you. Ask for an example of a time they pushed back.

Ask to see how they talk in public

An agency's writing is the cheapest due diligence there is. Look for specifics: real opinions, real failure modes, real tradeoffs. A team that writes like a brochure will build like one.

None of these questions require technical knowledge. That is the point. You are not testing whether the agency can code. You are testing whether the way they work will protect you when the project gets hard.