I've spent the last 10 years managing engineering teams for fintech projects, and I keep seeing the same patterns. Non-technical founders come in with specific assumptions about how software development works – assumptions that make perfect sense in other industries but create serious challenges in ours.
Let me share the three biggest misconceptions I encounter, why they matter, and what you can actually do about them.
Misconception #1: Planning Software Is Like Planning Construction
When you build a house, you lay the foundation, then build the structure, and finally do the interior. You create a detailed plan, form a budget, and execute. The entire process takes, say, a year or eighteen months. But software engineering works differently.
When building software products, there's a much higher level of uncertainty – details that you simply cannot plan and understand until you've actually started the execution. For example, building an MVP usually takes six months. But in six months, your requirements change due to customer development, new insights from early adopters, unexpected technical challenges, or market shifts. Now, the initial plan is no longer relevant, and you need to change the product concept or its functionality.
This is exactly why Agile frameworks exist in software development – they let you adjust plans after every iteration.
Why it matters: This directly impacts budgets. When you're a startup founder with an idea and a pitch deck, and you've raised your first round of investment, estimating the final cost of a product is extremely difficult. That’s why the scope of the first version should be as minimal as possible in both budget and time – to achieve a fast time-to-market and keep numbers predictable.
Misconception #2: You Build a Product Once, Then You're Done
Many fintech founders think: we'll invest X amount of money now to build a product, and that's it – no more development processes and costs. But that is not a viable strategy.
Your market is constantly changing, your clients are evolving, and your competitors are innovating – so, you need to keep developing the product to stay competitive. Moreover, you shouldn’t forget about basic maintenance to solve bugs and make improvements.
There's also another important layer – security. Sometimes, solution providers stop supporting and updating their products or certain versions. This means that the company no longer monitors potential vulnerabilities and makes new changes to stay security compliant. If you don't invest time in updating this technology, your platform risks becoming critically vulnerable to hacker attacks.
Solution: Have an agreement that the technical team can invest 30% of their time over a year in technical work. This agreement cannot be broken. If you break it, you must compensate. If you ignore this, you dramatically increase security risks.
Misconception #3: Development Costs Should Stay Consistent
As your product grows, so does the complexity of its functionality and the number of dependencies between different parts of the system. This directly affects development costs over time.
For example, when building the first version of your product, creating a simple login feature might take one week and cost around $2,000. Two years later, implementing the same feature could take six weeks and $12,000.
The reason is simple: you now have to account for a much larger number of existing dependencies in the system and ensure you don’t break anything that already works. As the system becomes more interconnected, the cost per feature naturally increases.
I’d also recommend investing early in QA engineers who write automated test scripts. When you have good coverage, you can move very fast without worrying that everything will fall apart. The only challenge is that it can increase development costs by 30%.
The Real Driver of Product Quality
The best collaborations happen when founders treat engineering teams as partners and invest in good relationships. They understand that the hidden element of a great product quality and success is team motivation. That’s why they invest time in explaining the problem they solve, the audience they help, and are transparent with any successes or failures.
They recognize the effort and, when possible, build relationships not with the team in general but with each person individually. Two years ago, one of our clients organized a conference for their customers and invited our engineers to directly participate in preparing the presentation and in presenting the AI system we built together. That simple gesture improved the collaboration and helped to strengthen trust, deepen ownership, and make everyone feel part of the mission.
The Bottom Line
Fintech products are never “build once and forget.” They are living systems – full of uncertainty, evolving requirements, increasing complexity, and ongoing security risks. Founders who embrace this reality, plan for continuous development, and treat engineers as strategic partners build better products, faster, and with far fewer surprises.