Eastern European Vendor Assessment Checklist

Delivery maturity, five questions
A strong answer names people, dates and documents; a weak one describes a methodology.

• Who owns project governance day to day, and what does the weekly review look like?
• Walk me through your last escalation: who noticed, how fast, what changed afterwards.
• Where does the documentation live, and who updates it when the scope changes?
• What did the last retrospective change in how the team works?
• Show me a post-incident review from the last twelve months.

AI readiness, five questions
The questions most evaluations skip. A vendor with real adoption answers in practice and numbers; a vendor with marketing adoption lists tools.

• Which AI tools does a senior engineer use every day, and for what part of the work?
• Where do they sit in the pipeline: code review, tests, QA, documentation?
• What velocity gain have you measured on a real project, and how did you measure it?
• What did you invest in upskilling, and who did not make the switch?
• Which quality gates changed because AI now writes part of the code?

Team quality, five questions
The signal is who stays and who leads.

• What is the senior-to-junior ratio on the team you would give us?
• How many of them have been with you more than three years?
• Who are the three engineers you cannot afford to lose, and what keeps them?
• How many candidates do you interview per hire, and who has the right to say no?
• Which leaders joined in the last year, and from where?

Client concentration, four questions
The numbers a vendor knows by heart if the business is run by numbers.

• What share of revenue is your largest client?
• And the top three clients together?
• How long does an average engagement last?
• What was your client retention rate last year?

Continuity and risk, five questions
Country-level reports do not answer these; the company does.

• Where does the team sit, city by city?
• What is the redundancy plan for power, connectivity and the office?
• What was client retention through 2022 to 2024?
• Who runs the company if the founder is out for three months?
• How many months of payroll are in reserve?

Cultural fit, three questions
Decides whether the first slipped sprint becomes a conversation or a dispute.

• What is the communication cadence with a client like us?
• Who escalates to whom when a sprint slips?
• How do you work across our time zone: overlap hours, on-call, handovers?

For the people accountable for a vendor decision in a Western product or services company:

• A CTO or VP of Engineering evaluating Eastern Europe for the first time, or replacing a vendor that failed
• A COO or CEO who approves the choice and wants the risk read before the contract, with continuity and cost predictability on the table
• A Head of Product who needs the external team to ship at product velocity, with real AI practice behind the claims

Use it in the first two calls with every vendor on your list; where the answers run thin, send us the brief and get three names that answer all 27.