Platform selections are usually run as technical evaluations with a commercial signature at the end. A shortlist, a scoring matrix, a set of demos, a recommendation, then a budget conversation. That order is backwards, and it is a large part of why so many replatforming projects finish roughly on time and then underperform for two years.
The questions that actually decide it
Three, and none of them appear on a feature matrix.
- What does it cost to operate, in people and hours, once the project team has gone?
- What does it prevent us from doing in two years, and how confident are we that we will not want to do that?
- Can the team we actually have run it on a Tuesday afternoon in December, when two people are on holiday and something has broken?
The third one sounds flippant. It is the one that determines whether the platform is a capability or a dependency. A stack that requires a specialist for every routine change will slow the commercial team down permanently, and that cost never appears in the business case because it arrives as friction rather than as an invoice.
A stack that needs a specialist for every routine change becomes a permanent tax on the commercial team.
Optionality is the expensive part
Every platform choice closes doors. That is not an argument against choosing, it is an argument for knowing which doors. Pricing flexibility, market expansion, subscription mechanics, the ability to run a marketplace or a shop in shop later, how easily data leaves the system. Those are commercial questions dressed as technical ones.
The failure mode is not choosing badly. It is choosing without anyone in the room whose job is to think about year two.
How I would run it instead
Start with the commercial roadmap for the next three years, written before any vendor is contacted. Then ask each option what it costs to deliver that roadmap, including the parts it makes awkward. Feature comparison comes last and settles far less than people expect, because at this point most platforms in a category do most things.
And put an operating cost estimate in the business case. Licence plus implementation is the number everyone quotes. Licence plus implementation plus five years of running it is the number that decides whether this was a good idea.
If you are already mid project
The useful question is not whether to continue. It is what has already been cut from scope, and whether any of it was the reason for doing this in the first place. That happens more often than anyone admits, and it is recoverable if you catch it before launch rather than after.