A good plan is the best cost efficiency

0. Think hiring an expensive planner is wasteful?

It might just be the most cost-effective investment to save your product.

We once kicked off a new service project with huge excitement. Everyone was all in. The designer poured their soul into every pixel of the UI, and the developers fueled by coffee and energy drinks pulled endless all-nighters. Months flew by, and finally, launch day was just around the corner.

Then, in one meeting, an external expert who joined late dropped a single line that froze the entire room:

“But… will users actually use this feature? It feels completely disconnected from what our core audience expects.”

That one remark was the trigger. Suddenly, cracks appeared everywhere—our core logic, our user flows—none of it fit together. In the end, we scrapped the launch entirely and rebuilt almost everything from scratch. Months of effort and money evaporated in an instant.

If you’ve ever built a product, you’ve probably faced a version of this story. Why do these disasters keep repeating? And how do we prevent such costly failures?

The answer is a kind of investment many leaders overlook, yet one that dramatically boosts development efficiency: investing in proper planning.

1. The earlier you catch errors, the 100x cheaper they are

As you know, the later an error is discovered in the software lifecycle, the more expensive it becomes to fix. Think of building a house: erasing a line on the blueprint takes seconds, but tearing down walls and rebuilding takes enormous time and money.

Legendary computer scientist Barry Boehm quantified this reality. If the cost of fixing an error in the requirements or planning stage is 1, then fixing it during testing after development costs 15–40x more. Once the product has launched? It can be 100x or higher.

(Source: Boehm, B. and Basili, V. Software Defect Reduction Top 10 List, Computer, 2001)

Here’s what that looks like in real life—scenarios that probably feel familiar to anyone in the field:

[Scenario 1: Error found during planning]

• Planner: “Oh, I only included social logins, but our core 40s–50s audience may prefer email login. Should we add that option?”

• Designer: “Got it. I’ll update the prototype with one more button.”

Cost to fix: a few minutes.

[Scenario 2: Error found after launch]

• CS Team: “We’re getting complaints: ‘Why can’t I sign up with email?’ Too many users are dropping out during registration.”

• CEO: “Really? Let’s add email login then.”

• Developer: “…That means reworking the DB schema and rewriting the entire authentication logic. With testing, this will take at least two weeks.”

Cost to fix: two weeks of developer salaries + customer dissatisfaction + lost opportunities.

In the end, that five-minute conversation during the planning stage saved millions of won and countless potential customers.

Planning isn’t just about writing documents—it’s the most effective form of risk management, preventing massive costs before they happen.

2. But… developers want to build

“Sure, planning matters. But are we supposed to sit around for months waiting for the perfect spec?”

Of course not. Dragging out planning in the name of perfection leaves developers stuck in limbo. Developers want to code. They want to see their work come alive and ship to the world. But when specs keep getting delayed?

• Developer A: “Planner C, when can we expect that login spec you promised last week?”

• Planner C: “Uh… I realized there are too many edge cases. Let me refine it a bit more before sharing.”

(One week later…)

• Developer A (to a teammate): “Sigh… still under review. Guess I’ll just hack on a side project.”

Repeated too often, morale tanks. Progress stalls. And yet salaries are still being paid. By chasing the illusion of “perfect planning,” the team wastes far more—in time, money, and momentum.

What’s worse, many flaws only become visible once development starts. That’s why Agile methods have become the standard in tech. Build a minimum viable product (MVP), put it in users’ hands, gather feedback, and iterate. It turns out this way is not just faster, but also far more efficient.

Planning, then, is a delicate balancing act: chasing perfection while keeping up speed.

3. Which is why hiring a good planner is the cheapest move you can make

Let’s recap the dilemma:

• Poor planning creates massive downstream costs. (Catch errors early, or pay dearly later.)

• Endless planning leaves developers idle and opportunity costs mounting. (Developers want to work.)

The person who can walk this tightrope skillfully is the seasoned planner. Hiring such a planner is, in fact, the most cost-effective investment you can make in the entire development process.

Many founders will spend heavily to bring in top developers and world-class designers. But when it comes to planning, they cut corners—doing it themselves, handing it to juniors, or worse, telling developers to just “figure it out.”

That’s like putting a million-dollar engine in your car but settling for the cheapest navigation system. No matter how powerful the engine or sleek the design, what’s the point if you’re driving in the wrong direction?

4. A good planner is not just a requirements scribe

They do far more than write down what others say:

• They ask the real questions: “Why do we need this feature? What customer problem does it actually solve?”

• They act as translators: turning a founder’s vision into terms developers can code, and explaining technical limits in a way the founder understands.

• They spot hidden risks: legal, policy, data, and operational pitfalls that could explode later.

• They set clear priorities: cutting through the noise to decide what matters most right now, balancing impact against resources.

Imagine a 5-person dev team with a monthly burn of ₩40M. If a bad plan wastes just one month, that’s ₩40M gone. But if a senior planner—earning ₩5M more in salary—catches that mistake once, the company is already ahead by ₩35M. Over the life of a product, a good planner creates hundreds of millions in value this way.

5. So what can you do right now?

Hiring a great planner is the best move, but it takes time. In the meantime, here are three things you can implement immediately:

1. Make planning measurable.

   Stop treating planning as “inherently fuzzy.” Track metrics like “number of developer questions about unclear specs” or “story points re-estimated due to spec changes.” High numbers are a clear signal your planning process is broken.

2. Invest in planning tools.

   Just as you invest in dev tools to boost engineering productivity, invest in tools that boost planning productivity. Solutions that automatically structure team ideas, consolidate fragmented documents, and integrate with external platforms to streamline collaboration.

3. Run ‘planning retros,’ not just post-mortems.

   Analyzing failures after a project ends is too late. At the start of a project, gather devs and designers to ask: “Where are the holes in this plan? What concerns us most?” Normalize reviewing the plan itself before execution.

So next time you allocate R&D budget, ask yourself:

“Are we only investing in developer speed, or are we also strengthening the steering wheel that sets their direction?”

The best ROI doesn’t come from more speed—it comes from getting direction right at the very first step.