FBSC

Budget

We do need to know clients’ budgets. This is often uncomfortable for them but their budget helps determines what scope is possible. It saves time. If they don’t know their budget, we discuss different options.

We talk about breaking product rollout into stages and try to improve the product’s chances of success at each stage by:

• Focusing on a small subset of features.
• Designing a valuable user experience.
• Developing a meaningful relationship with users.
• Budgeting for marketing tactics to tell users about the product.
• Designing interactions into the product for users to bring other users to the product.

No Fixed Bids

Some consulting relationships start with a requirements document or RFP (“Request For Proposal”). The requirements are often extremely detailed.

The probability of this document containing the optimum feature set is extremely low. The right features are better learned through user interviews, prototyping, releasing actual software, and getting feedback from real users.

Based on that document, clients expect consultants in the industry to submit an exact timeframe and bid. This contract style sets the client and consultant working against each other right from day one. Instead of focusing on designing the product experience or evaluating what assumptions were wrong, they spend time negotiating about what was meant in a document written a long time ago or focusing on arbitrary deadlines. But it’s worse than negotiating; it’s retroactively discussing something that no one remembers the same way.

As you might have guessed, we don’t do fixed-bid, fixed-feature-set proposals.