Managing clients’ money as our own

If you have worked in any engineering project, you know how hard it is to fulfil deadlines: engineering is complex, often resulting in unexpected challenges to solve along our journey and, consequently in delays. These delays naturally have impact on the costs of the project, supported by the client.

So delays are indeed part of the life of an engineering roadmap, but these need to be addressed.

At Whitesmith we’ve improved our approach to these delays by addressing them immediately after we have the predictions: we do it by communicating the bad news to the customer and bringing a list of proposed solutions to decrease them. (Spoiler: most of the times is about cutting scope and re-prioritization). This improves the velocity of response to the issues and calibrates the client’s expectations.

Nonetheless, with a good portion of our clients, a surprising pattern surfaced when applying this approach: The client’s first reaction to bad news is actually… OK. They understand calmly that delays happen and that we should just continue doing our best with the already defined work.

Their money, their choices. Everything looks fine, so the team keeps working. If the clients are comfortable, we are too.

It’s only a few days or weeks after that clients seem to be confronted with reality — it’s then that a reaction from them surfaces, asking us to address it differently than what was initially discussed.

But now it’s too late. The work has advanced, no re-priotization was done, features that made sense to cut are now already built, and no person was added to the team when that would still have impact.

The loss has happened and the client is unhappy. But, regardless of the reason, we hate to have unhappy clients.

To avoid this from happening, we have been changing our mindset when addressing these delays. Actually, we have been adopting the same mindset we already have in other phases of the project, as for example when defining the roadmap: We manage clients’ money as if it was our own.

For example, during roadmap definition, we advise our clients to pick only what we believe it’s necessary to achieve the goals in mind, and to have a pragmatic approach to their implementation.

Now, during delivery, when delays surface we also influence our clients to make the best decision for them and their product, even if it’s only money related. We manage the client’s money as if was our own.

For example, when a delay is predicted, we immediately recommend a few measures to take place which we strongly believe should happen (e.g: repriotization or cut of features). To make the decision easier for clients, we pick try to pick measures that don’t discard the initial plan immediately: for example, reprioritization brings focus to other tasks but leaves the options open in case we later decide to stick with the initial plan.

I’m Daniel, Product Manager at Whitesmith. Paper Planes is a place where I reflect my experiences and learnings on the craft of Product Management, and where I share them with my team and community.

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