I think a highly effective strategy is an outward-in somewhat recursive iteration from high-level details towards a polished, robust solution. Of course, the fi

I think a highly effective strategy is an outward-in somewhat recursive iteration from high-level details towards a polished, robust solution. Of course, the first step must be some sort of sketch, however minimal or vague, of the user-facing functionality -- "user" can mean a number of things here, depending on the application -- or else you have no idea what you are doing. Something like: 1. High-level, low fidelity sketch of the user stories and the UI 2. High-level, low fidelity sketch of a possible database schema 3. Refinement of UI and user stories 4. Mid-level sketch of possible API 5. Refinement of DB schema and backend models 6. First pass implementation the UI 7. First pass implementation of the backend (db + models + API) ... A few more iterations, bug testing, and voila! Of course, minor variations of this could also work well. For example, 6 and 7 could probably be easily switched.