The most expensive sentence in a software project: "We'll figure that out later"
The most expensive sentence in a software project is "we'll figure that out later." It is also, sometimes, the right call. The skill is knowing which.
Some decisions can genuinely wait. The colour of the buttons. The name of the report. Which of two email providers to use. Change them next quarter and nothing is lost.
Other decisions create path dependency the moment you defer them, because everything built afterward assumes the default. How customers are identified across systems. Whether a record can have more than one owner. Who owns the code and the data when the contract ends. How permissions work. Whether the thing has to run in more than one country. Each of those, deferred, gets decided anyway, silently, by whatever was easiest to build that week, and undoing it later costs a multiple of deciding it now.
So when you hear the sentence, ask one thing: if we decide this wrong now and change it in a year, what has to be rebuilt? If the answer is "a screen," fine, later it is. If the answer is "the data model" or "the contract," it is not a later decision. It is a now decision that someone would prefer not to have.
The sentence is not a red flag on its own. Hearing it three times about the same topic is.