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Discussion on: Code price-tag

 
krofdrakula profile image
Klemen Slavič

The way I approach projects in general is to create a list of features and their requirements (and prerequisites). This gives you information about the ordering of features that can be delivered.

Let's take a news aggregator app as an example. Take the user-facing features as milestones and order them based on prerequisites:

  1. visual design (if not done in-house)
  2. public feed (list)
  3. detail view (item)
  4. login & registration
  5. personal feed & management
  6. user interaction (sharing, comments, etc.)
  7. 3rd party news API integration

The most important thing about ordering these features is that all the prerequisites of a feature are above the feature in question. You also want to deliver the most critical milestones first, and depending on the needs of the client, you want to move those up whenever possible. That will increase the client's confidence in the process and will quickly build trust from their side, since you're prioritising their needs.

You can use something like a Trello board to break down the milestones into tasks, and share that board with your client so that they can keep track of progress, or maybe even leave feedback if you continuously deploy your application as you complete more tasks. This also enables a fast feedback loop, but you HAVE TO always keep in mind that these conversations will often go out of scope of the current task. Remind them that those changes need to be negotiated as an additional milestone if they go out of scope of what was already agreed upon.

For each milestone, you can then set a price given your estimation of the amount of work, and agree with the client to pay for the milestone upfront. That way, the client has the option of paying upfront for the next couple of milestones in case individual payments carry a high cost (in time or money) to them, or just decide to pay for each as you go. If things go south or the project is cancelled, you still get paid for the chunk of work they committed to.

Other than that, keep to the advice given in the video, and make sure to keep in mind that each milestones needs to have a tangible deliverable for the client. That's the golden rule to managing client relationships and keep them happy and satisfied.

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kostassar profile image
Kostas Sar

Again, thank you! You have been very helpful!