First-Time Founder's Guide to Working with a Dev Team

Your First Time Working with a Dev Team

Working with a dev team for the first time can feel like stepping into a foreign country. Different language, different customs, different pace. Developers talk about "sprints" and "standups" and "pull requests" and you nod along hoping context will fill in the blanks.

Here's the good news: you don't need to become a developer to work effectively with one. You need to understand how modern development teams operate, what they expect from you, and how to measure whether things are going well. This guide covers all of it.

Understanding How Modern Dev Teams Work

Most professional development teams use some form of Agile methodology. Don't let the buzzword scare you — Agile is simply a way of building software in small, frequent increments instead of trying to build everything at once.

The Core Idea

Instead of spending 6 months building everything and then revealing the finished product, Agile teams work in short cycles (usually 2 weeks). At the end of each cycle, you see working software, provide feedback, and adjust direction.

This matters for you because:

• You see progress every 2 weeks — No more wondering what's happening behind the scenes
• You can change direction cheaply — Caught a mistake? Pivot the next cycle. With traditional development, changes late in the process are expensive.
• You're involved throughout — Your feedback directly shapes the product

The Team Structure

A typical development team includes:

On smaller teams, one person might fill multiple roles. A dedicated team from an agency typically includes 2–4 people covering all these functions.

Sprint Planning: Where Direction Gets Set

Sprint planning is the meeting where you and the development team decide what gets built in the next 2-week cycle. It's one of the most important meetings you'll attend.

Your Role in Sprint Planning

• Define priorities — What's the most important thing to ship next? This is your call.
• Provide context — Why does this feature matter? What user problem does it solve? This helps developers make better implementation decisions.
• Accept tradeoffs — The team will tell you how much they can realistically build in 2 weeks. Trust their estimates. If you push for more, quality suffers.

How Sprint Planning Works

1. Review the backlog — The list of all features and tasks that need to be built
2. Select items — Pick the highest-priority items that fit within the sprint capacity
3. Discuss details — The team asks questions, clarifies requirements, identifies unknowns
4. Commit — The team agrees on what they'll deliver by sprint end
5. Document — Everything discussed goes into the project management tool

What to Avoid

• Don't add work mid-sprint unless something is genuinely on fire. Every addition displaces something else.
• Don't skip sprint planning. Without clear priorities, the team makes their own decisions — which may not match yours.
• Don't estimate for the team. "This should be easy" is a phrase that has launched a thousand arguments. Let developers estimate their own work.

Standups: Staying Informed Without Micromanaging

Standups are short daily or thrice-weekly meetings where the team briefly shares what they're working on and what's blocking them.

The Format

Each person answers three questions:

1. What did I work on since the last standup?
2. What am I working on today?
3. Is anything blocking me?

Should You Attend?

Yes, but passively. Listen. Learn. If something sounds off, note it and discuss after the standup — not during. Standups should last 10–15 minutes. The moment a founder starts asking detailed questions in standup, it becomes a 45-minute meeting and the team resents it.

What Standups Tell You

• Progress velocity — Are tasks moving from "in progress" to "done"?
• Blockers — Is something stuck waiting for your input, a design decision, or a third-party service?
• Team health — Do people sound engaged or frustrated? Are the same issues coming up repeatedly?

If you can't attend standups regularly, ask the project manager for a daily async summary in Slack or email. Most good teams provide this automatically.

Sprint Demos: Your Most Important Meeting

Every 2 weeks, the team shows you what they built. This is the sprint demo (also called a "sprint review"), and it's the most valuable 30–60 minutes in your development cycle.

What Happens

• The team walks through each completed feature
• You interact with the working software (not mockups — real, functioning code)
• You provide feedback: "This is exactly right," or "This works, but the flow feels wrong because..."
• The team notes your feedback for the next sprint

How to Give Good Feedback

• Be specific — "I don't like the dashboard" isn't actionable. "The dashboard shows too much data at once — can we highlight only the three most important metrics?" is.
• Focus on user impact — Frame feedback around what users need, not personal preference
• Separate bugs from preferences — "This button doesn't work" is a bug (fix now). "I'd prefer the button to be blue" is a preference (next sprint).
• Praise what works — Development teams are human. Acknowledging good work motivates better work.

Code Reviews and Quality: What You Should Know

You don't need to read code, but you should understand how quality is maintained.

What Code Reviews Are

Before any new code goes into the product, another developer reviews it. They check for:

• Does the code do what it's supposed to?
• Is it written cleanly and maintainably?
• Are there security vulnerabilities?
• Will it work at scale?

What Testing Looks Like

Your role is user acceptance testing (UAT). When the team delivers a feature, you test it as a user would. Does it solve the problem? Is the flow intuitive? Does it feel right? You're the best person to judge this because you understand the user better than anyone on the team.

Handling Disagreements

Disagreements are normal and healthy. Here's how to handle the most common ones.

"It Will Take Too Long"

When the team estimates 4 weeks for something you think should take 1 week, resist the urge to override their judgment. Instead, ask:

• "What makes this complex?"
• "Can we simplify the scope to deliver something in 2 weeks instead?"
• "What's the quickest version that still delivers value?"

Usually, the disagreement resolves when you understand the complexity or reduce the scope.

"That's Not What I Asked For"

This happens when requirements weren't clear enough. Don't blame — solve:

• "Here's what I was imagining — let me show you an example"
• "Let's make sure we document this better for next time"
• Check your brief and user stories — were they actually clear?

"We Need to Refactor"

Sometimes the team says they need to spend a sprint cleaning up code instead of building new features. This feels frustrating, but it's like maintaining a car — skip the oil changes and the engine eventually fails.

A reasonable rule: up to 20% of development time on code maintenance and quality improvements. If it's consistently more, there might be a deeper problem worth discussing.

Measuring Progress the Right Way

As a founder, you need to know if your project is on track. Here's what to measure and what to ignore.

Useful Metrics

• Sprint velocity — How many tasks/points the team completes per sprint. It should be roughly consistent.
• Demo quality — Are the features demonstrated every 2 weeks getting closer to your vision?
• Burndown chart — Shows how much work remains in a sprint. Should trend downward.
• Bugs found in production — After launch, track how often users encounter problems. Fewer is better.

Misleading Metrics

• Lines of code — More code doesn't mean more progress. Sometimes deleting code is progress.
• Hours worked — Output matters, not input. A great developer can accomplish in 4 hours what an average one takes 16 hours to do.
• Number of commits — Tells you activity, not productivity.

The Best Progress Indicator

Honestly, the best way to measure progress is simple: attend every sprint demo and use the software yourself. If what you see every 2 weeks feels like meaningful progress toward your vision, things are going well. If it doesn't, raise the concern immediately — not 3 months later.

Setting Your Team Up for Success

The development team's output is directly proportional to the quality of input they receive from you. Here's how to be a great client:

Be Available

Respond to questions within a few hours during business days. Unanswered questions block progress. A developer waiting 3 days for your answer on a requirement is a developer who can't work efficiently for 3 days.

Be Decisive

Analysis paralysis is the enemy of shipping. Make decisions with 80% of the information. You can adjust later — that's the whole point of building iteratively.

Be Honest About Changes

If your priorities change, say so early. "I know we planned to build the reporting feature next, but after talking to customers, I think we should focus on the notification system instead." This is fine and expected. What's not fine is changing priorities silently and expecting the team to read your mind.

Respect the Process

The sprint structure, standups, and demos aren't bureaucracy — they're the framework that keeps complex projects on track. If you routinely skip meetings, override sprint plans, or push emergency changes, you're undermining the system that protects your investment.

From First-Timer to Effective Product Leader

Working with a dev team gets easier and more productive over time. By your third or fourth sprint, you'll understand the rhythm. By month three, you'll be giving feedback like a product manager. The key is showing up, asking questions, and trusting the process while maintaining your vision.

Building your first product and want a team that makes the process smooth? Talk to us — we work with first-time founders regularly and our process is designed to make your first development experience a successful one. Use our cost calculator to see what a dedicated team would look like for your project.