Data ownership and boundaries
Identify the main business entities, who can create or change them, and which records must remain consistent. A clear data model makes permissions, reporting and future integrations easier to reason about.
Avoid adding services and databases merely because they are popular. Start with the simplest architecture that meets the product's reliability and delivery needs.
Authentication is not authorisation
Authentication answers who a user is. Authorisation answers what that user is allowed to do. A product with multiple customers, workspaces or roles needs explicit access rules, not just a successful login.
Test the negative paths: users trying to access another account's data, expired sessions, revoked access and actions they should not be allowed to perform.
Background work and integrations
Email, file processing, webhooks and AI calls can take longer or fail independently of a user request. A queue or background worker may be appropriate when work needs retries, visibility or isolation.
For external integrations, plan for timeouts, duplicate webhook events, rate limits and partial failures. A happy-path demo does not prove an integration is dependable.
Operational readiness
Before launch, know how to configure secrets, inspect errors, back up important data, deploy a change and recover from a failure. The right level of monitoring and backup depends on the product's risk.
Ask your engineering partner to explain the important decisions in plain language and document the parts your team will need to own.