20 Questions That Set High-Performing Dev Teams Apart
How top engineering teams ensure excellence in delivery.
I’m a huge fan—and promoter—of checklists.
Why? Because they protect me from one of our most common human flaws: a fallible memory.
This flaw is amplified in software engineering. We juggle design tradeoffs, architectural decisions, technical limitations, and deadlines. We must also maintain a high-quality standard throughout the entire process, from planning to implementation to delivery.
That’s why, over the years, the teams I’ve worked with have co-created checklists to hold ourselves accountable and aim for excellence in delivery.
Excellence in Delivery: 20 Questions to Guide Your Next Feature
Here’s a curated set of 20 prompts I draw from when building a task implementation checklist. It’s split into two parts:
Before Task Planning: Help the task owner prepare.
During Task Planning: Guide the technical discussion.
Before Task Planning
These prompts are for the task owner to prepare a focused and inclusive planning session.
1. What meeting roles do we need to make planning efficient?
Who facilitates? Who takes notes and adds subtasks? Who tracks time? Who ensures we stay on topic?
2. Who are the right people to implement this feature?
Do we need backend, frontend, or mobile devs? Should we involve QA, product, PMs, or designers?
3. Do we need someone more familiar with this section of the app?
Who’s worked on this before—on our team or elsewhere?
4. Are there any risks of this task being delayed?
Is this task blocked? Does it block others? Any key contributors with a high bus factor?
During Task Planning
These questions structure the technical conversation and help expose hidden effort.
5. Is the scope clear enough?
Review the description, acceptance criteria, test cases, and designs. Are there open questions or dependencies?
6. How are we going to implement it?
Which layers are involved—entities, services, APIs, UI, infra? Sketch diagrams if helpful. Peek into the codebase if needed.
7. Does it require platform-specific analysis?
Any migrations, infra setup, or knowledge gaps? If yes, plan for spike tasks or separate syncs.
8. Does it require a cross-platform API contract?
Use design-by-contract. Document the spec and get approvals across teams.
9. Are the API endpoints documented and integrated into the app?
Do we have all the dependencies? Are the contracts and implementations aligned?
10. Is there a similar design or functionality in the app?
Don’t reinvent if you can repurpose.
11. Is there a similar design or functionality on the other teams?
If available, get familiar with the implementation of the feature.
12. What other functionalities will be impacted by implementing this task?
Think user flows, edge cases, and integration points.
13. Does this task affect our users’ existing features in production?
Consider deployment strategies—feature flags, blue/green, branch by abstraction.
14. Does this affect features in production?
Docs, Storybook, telemetry, permissions, user access, etc.
15. Do we need any new localization keys?
Can translations be scoped and started early?
16. What should we log?
User actions, business events, errors—across which layers? What’s the best logging strategy?
17. How and what do we test?
Think unit, integration, E2E, manual, multi-device, i18n, and performance. Who owns what?
18. What would you demo if the story were done today?
Role-play the demo. Spot missing cases. Create subtasks as needed.
19. How will we collaborate effectively?
Can we split the effort across devs? How will we sync—pairing, CI, check-ins?
20. What's the branching strategy?
CI or feature branch? What do we branch from? Any merge dependencies?
Closing Thoughts
There’s no doubt that checklists raise our bar. Other industries—aviation, construction, medicine—use them religiously. Why not us?
As projects evolve, refine your checklist. Observe what works, write it down, and pass it on.
—Alex