How to Detect When the Conversation Has Entered Murky Waters

James Williams of Cofebe.com joined me on Ditching Hourly to give what amounted to a masterclass on how to avoid failure and delight clients as a fractional CTO.

“The chance of failure increases proportionally with you accepting what the client tells you what to do.”

“If you accept 100% of your client’s suggestions and three months from they can’t launch or it fails, guess whose fault that is.”

“If you keep the narrative on the goal, you can avoid debates about scope.”

“I lead with questions from the back.”

“I ask a trillion questions upfront to disqualify prospects before considering pricing.”

“I’d rather take the advisory part and use the client’s dev team whenever possible.“

“I’d rather use their team than mine.”

”We don’t even do scope of work.“

“It’s not about the hours. It’s about the outcomes.”

“To guide the engineers, I write paragraphs on how the client should feel at every demo and what the qualitative goal should be.“

“My goal is always to get smaller, not bigger.”

James’ Links

• Website: https://www.cofebe.com/
• Courses: https://courses.cofebe.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdubyou/
• Substack: https://jdubyou.substack.com/

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