By Janina
Here's my quick story about how I understood what proposal documents really are! 📋💁🏼♀️
Recently, I had a promising lead from Munich’s business ecosystem. They could have gone to any IT service provider for a quote. Why me?
I knew that they were price-sensitive, so I knew I needed to prove to them my value of "premium product management" - in a way that big fancy agencies, dev-only offshore providers, and UpWork freelancers wouldn’t - but how?
This is what I did - before any commitment from my lead:
🔖 I asked tons of questions—hoping to not annoy the customer, but knowing they would see the value in the end.
🔖 I mapped out my insights by outlining user personas, user flows, technical requirements, assumptions, limitations, open questions, and concerns (before actually stating budget & timeline).
🔖I turned everything into a detailed, structured offer document - so comprehensively and precisely describing their app idea that they could theoretically take the document straight to another developer to request a counteroffer!
Was it a risk? Nope! This written offer was my first tangible opportunity to demonstrate how I think and work - and to build trust.
Even before signing any deal, I helped the customer understand their own idea and guide them on their way through early-stage product development. And that was my game-changer in competing against cheaper or bigger players.
So, flipping the perspective: That's how I understood that written offers are the customers' early warning system against bad deals!
If you get a proposal so good that it is already a valuable product document for your new product endeavors, stay with that development partner‼️☝🏻
PS: I put together a short PDF guide (German) with more insider tips on how to identify the right app development partner - genuine and definitely not written by ChatGPT 🫠