Clarifying scope for a fintech startup before a single line of code was written

The situation

A fintech founder came to me two weeks before their contracted dev team was due to start work. They had a product vision, a pitch deck, and a Notion doc full of ideas. What they didn't have was a technical specification their dev team could actually build from.

Their dev team — a small offshore agency — was experienced and capable. But without clear requirements, they'd have to make assumptions. And in fintech, wrong assumptions are expensive.

What I did

Over five working days, I ran three structured sessions with the founder to extract what the product actually needed to do:

• A discovery session to understand the core user journey and the problem being solved
• A requirements workshop to turn high-level features into specific, testable behaviours
• A scope review to cut anything that wasn't essential for the first version

The output was a 14-page requirements document and a prioritised feature list that the dev team could work from directly.

The outcome

The dev team started work with full clarity on what to build. There were no major scope changes during the build phase. The founder estimated that without the upfront scoping work, they would have spent 3–4 weeks in revision cycles correcting misunderstood requirements.

The project delivered on time and within budget.