| title | description |
|---|---|
Vendor Evaluations |
How to evaluate 3rd party vendors |
Evaluting vendors can be daunting and overwhelming. Here are list of considerations when evaluation a vendor, grouped by larger themes:
Cost
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ROI
- What is the cost of the vendor? How does their fee structure scale?
- What the value would we get out of integrating with this vendor? Can we put a number on it in terms of dollars/engineering hours?
Ease of integration
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Time to delivery
- How long would it take to integrate with this vendor?
- What is the opportunity cost?
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Migration complexity
- What is the path to integration? Is it complex or straightforward?
- How fleshed out are the docs?
- Is there a community of devs using this vendor?
- Does the vendor use well-accepted protocols or their own proprietary implementations?
- Do we have to replace an in-house solution? How does that affect the integration plan?
Feature set
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Does it solve our problem?
- If it is not perfect for our use case, is it good enough?
- Does the solution scale well? Do you see us continuing using it a year from now? 5 years from now?
- Does it offer UI/brand customization? Do we need UI/brand customization now? Will we in the future?
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Vendor qualities
- Are they the experts in this problem space?
- What stage of the company is the vendor in? Could that affect integration or support?
- How fast is the technology or problem space changing? Is the vendor responsive to these changes?
Vendor lockin
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Migrating off
- Would to be hard to migrate off this vendor if we change our minds?
- Is the integration very custom to our stack?
- Is there a data export feature? Is the data export protocol established industry standard or proprietary?
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Vendor Ecosystem
- Is there any convenience we gain from staying within the vendor ecosystem?
- Is the ecosystem we're locked in good enough? Could we revisit other options when we have more capacity?
Compliance/Legal
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Legal risk
- Does this vendor cover our legal risk?
- Does this vendor expose us to more legal risk?
- Are there privacy concerns?
- Will the vendor require access to our code base?
Company-level Strategy
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Strategic alignment
- Does the solution this vendor offers align with our company strategy?