Agency shortlists usually come from Dribbble shots and hourly rates. Neither tells you what happens in month four, when the payment provider changes its API and the release is three weeks away.
When you compare digital product design and development services, you are buying the decisions a team makes when the plan breaks. The nine checks below show you those decisions before you sign the contract.
Ask them to cut something from your roadmap
Send over your full list of features you want to build. Ask the team which features they would remove from the initial release. If they say they can build everything on your roadmap, they will likely charge you for the admin panel your ops team will be using twice a month.
The answer you want comes with a cost attached. For example, 2 weeks of backend development for an edge case or integration that can come later, once you’ve hit 1,000 active accounts. This team will gladly take ownership of scoping.
Meet the people who will do the work
The sales call will typically be led by a founder or account manager. They won’t look at any Figma or code. Book a 30 minute meeting with the lead designer and tech lead who will be working on your project.
Ask each of them individually how they would solve your riskiest feature. If the designer says they will build a real-time dashboard but the tech lead says they will sync data once a day — you have found the conflict before it reaches a sprint.
Test the handoff between design and engineering
If the designer has approved a screen and the developer then realises half the fields aren’t coming back from the API — this is where most delays will happen.
Ask whether developers will review the design before sending it to the client. Ask if the designers will approve builds on staging. If design and engineering come from separate vendors with no shared reviews, plan for extra weeks of rework.
Look at how they price discovery
If they give you an estimate after one call — they’re guessing, and each wrong guess returns as a change request. If they charge for a discovery phase, you’ll get some documentation. This will include user flows, technical spec, risk register, and release plan.
Ask for an anonymised discovery document from a previous project. If they can’t provide one, they’ll likely move the goalposts during development.
Ask about a project that went wrong
Get info on the project that didn’t go according to plan and the changes made to achieve a desirable result.
Look out for any processes they have in place. For instance, they have a process to freeze API contracts before the design sprint. If they don’t have any stories to tell, they haven’t done many projects or aren’t ready to talk through risks.
Read case studies for constraints and numbers
The designs might be great. Look for constraints they had to work with and which metric improved after launch. If they had to work with a legacy core banking system or a review deadline from the regulator, this tells you more about the team.
A line like “We reduced KYC drop-off from 41% to 18% over 2 releases” is much better than 10 screenshots. If their case study finishes with client satisfaction, ask what the numbers looked like.
Check domain knowledge in regulated industries
In FinTech and digital health, compliance will shape half of your product flows. Explore how they designed a KYC-compliant onboarding flow that didn’t lose users during ID verification. Learn how they handled audit logging, data residency, and PCI DSS scope.
If they have this experience — they will have mapped out these requirements in week one. If not — you’ll be hearing about them a month before launch, and every fix will push the release date.
Run the exit test
Ask how long another team would need to take over the product if you ended the contract in three months. This tells you how they think about code ownership and documentation.
Expect repositories in your own GitHub or GitLab account from the first commit, written architecture decisions, and a design system with named components. A partner that sets these up unasked is planning for your product and whoever works on it next.
Ask to see a real status report
Ask for a redacted weekly report from a current project. It shows what the team tells clients when the news is bad.
A report worth reading lists shipped work, blockers, decisions waiting on you, and budget spend against the plan. A line like “progress on the dashboard” gives you nothing to act on.
Where Goodface fits
Price and portfolio still matter, but compare them only between teams that pass the checks above.
At Goodface agency, designers and engineers run each project as one team, from paid discovery and UX research to backend architecture and launch. Developers review every design before it reaches you, and your repositories live in your account from day one.
Put us through these nine checks. We’ll open the first call by telling you what we’d cut from your roadmap.
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