What the Best Clients Do Differently

Written from the other side

Most advice about working with agencies is written for buyers by people who want to sell to them. This is the view from the delivery side: the specific behaviours that correlate with projects going well.

None of them are about being an easy client. Several of the best clients we have had were demanding. They were demanding about the right things.

1. They decide quickly

The single strongest predictor. A client who answers a scope question within 48 hours will finish materially sooner than one who takes two weeks, with the same team and the same scope.

It does not require being right every time. A decision that turns out to be wrong and gets corrected in a fortnight costs far less than the same decision made three weeks late.

We have never lost time to a client making a wrong decision quickly. We have lost months to right decisions made slowly.

2. They share bad news early

Funding that might not come through, a sponsor who is leaving, a priority shift, an internal objection. Told early, we sequence the work to protect what matters. Told late, we have spent the budget in the wrong order.

One client told us in week three that a merger might halt the project. We built the standalone-valuable part first. The merger happened, the project paused, and the delivered part is still in use four years later.

3. They protect one person's time

Two hours a week from someone who knows the process and can decide. Not the most senior person available — the most available person with authority.

• Attends the demo most fortnights
• Answers questions in the shared channel within a day
• Can approve scope changes without a committee
• Knows the operational detail, not just the strategy

4. They say what they actually think

“It looks great” when it does not is the most expensive politeness in software. Distributed teams cannot read a room; if you do not like something, saying so plainly is a gift.

The clients we have worked best with were direct to the point of bluntness at demos. Everything got fixed while it was cheap to fix.

5. They treat version one as a hypothesis

The best clients expect the first version to be partly wrong and plan to learn from it. They ship to a small group, watch, and adjust.

The clients who struggle treat the specification as a promise and any deviation as a failure — which prevents exactly the learning the first release exists to produce.

What they do not do

• Negotiate the price down and then expect the original scope
• Add stakeholders in month three who were not in the discovery
• Compare progress to what a different team quoted
• Ask for daily stand-ups and then not attend
• Treat the warranty as a way to get free features

None of these are catastrophic. All of them cost time that could have gone into the software.

Frequently asked questions