Briefing a Digital Partner: What to Agree Before the First Sprint

Projects rarely fail loudly. They drift. Scope grows a little each week, nobody wants to be the one to raise it, and then there is an uncomfortable conversation three months in about what was and was not included.

Almost all of it is preventable, and almost none of it requires a longer contract. It requires four things said out loud before work starts.

1. Who owns the decision when you disagree

Not who approves. Who decides. These are different, and conflating them is the single most common cause of a stalled project. Approval can be a committee. Decision cannot.

Name one person on each side. Write their names down. When a design question goes three rounds without resolution, that is not a design problem, it is a missing decision-maker.

2. What “done” means for each deliverable

A page is not done when it looks right on the designer’s screen. Agree the definition explicitly: which breakpoints, which browsers, which content states. An empty state, a long-text state and an error state are part of the work, and if they are not named they will be discovered late and built badly.

3. Who supplies content, and by when

This is the quiet killer. More launches slip on missing copy and photography than on engineering. If the client is supplying content, the deadline for that content is a project milestone with the same weight as any other, and the consequence of missing it should be agreed in advance.

If nobody can realistically produce it, decide at the start that the agency writes it. That is a different budget and a different timeline, and finding out in week nine helps no one.

4. What happens after launch

• Who holds the hosting, domain and analytics accounts. In the client’s name, always.
• Who fixes a bug found in week two, and whether that is billable.
• Whether the client can edit the thing without calling you, and which parts.
• What the handover actually contains: credentials, source, and a document a non-technical person can follow.

An agency that resists putting accounts in your name is telling you something useful about how the relationship ends.

The shortest version

One decision-maker per side. A written definition of done. Content treated as a dated deliverable. Accounts in the client’s name. Four sentences, agreed before the first sprint, prevent most of the arguments that make people distrust agencies.