This year, I arrived at a phase readout with more material than fit in our hour together. There was a main deck, three supplemental decks, and an interactive summary. I asked the client to review the rest on their own and schedule deeper dives where they wanted. A few weeks earlier, on a different engagement, the client's product leader asked us to change the plan. His team had received a lot from us and couldn't sit with most of it. He wanted a full working day together, even though it would disrupt the schedule, so that his team could discuss the work, build on it, and own it before executive stakeholders saw it.
On both engagements, I had planned the work the way I always had. Then we produced at a rate the plan did not account for. This is written for other consultants working with the same tools, because the problem is ours to solve.
Our work ends where production starts
Most writing about AI moving the bottleneck focuses on building software. There, the output is code, and someone other than the author can review it. Our work happens before that, in the decisions about what to build and why. The output is a decision. A decision is made when the person who has to defend it understands it well enough to do so. The path from decision to working software is shorter than ever, so a wrong decision reaches customers faster, too. The upstream work carries more weight now.
This was true before AI
Clients hire an outside partner because they need expertise or capacity they do not have, and usually both. Either way, the work still needs their time. We do not take a brief and come back two months later with an answer. The client knows what will work in their organization and what the problem actually is. We can't do any of that without them. For years, we have known that some clients don't have the time to get help. The clients who hire us for capacity usually have the least time to give.
What changed
We now transcribe every meeting, interview, and test on an engagement into a shared record the whole team can search. A synthesis across a round of stakeholder interviews is drafted in minutes. The people who ran the interviews then spend an hour checking it against what they heard. A few years ago, that was a whole day for the team at a wall of sticky notes.
Producing a draft is fast now, but editing still takes as long as before. On one engagement, we ran roughly twice as many interviews as we would have a few years ago, in the same two weeks. That meant twice as many people told us what they thought and expected to see reflected back. On another, the client asked for breadth before depth, and we generated close to two hundred low-fidelity concepts. Someone needed to judge each one. The people who had to judge them had no more hours than before.
We now understand that production is no longer the slow part. What I have not seen discussed is what that does to the plan. We wrote our plans as if the client's time and budget moved together.
What an afternoon together found
The in-person day the product leader asked for narrowed those two hundred concepts to under forty. It also revealed a gap in the set that nobody had seen after weeks of asynchronous review. The concepts covered one part of the product well and barely touched the rest. The breadth had been worth having, because the gap was only visible against it. The day also did something a readout could not. The team argued with the work, added to it, and came out with a direction they could call their own before anyone above them saw it. Without that day, they would have been asked to react to the work in front of their executives, with no time to think it through, and the ideas that needed building on would have been lost. A week later, the product leader asked for a set of principles his team could use to judge what we had made.
Two things we control
The client's hours to collaborate with us are fixed, and more budget doesn't create more time. We used to scope an engagement to the budget and assume the client would find the time. For years that worked. Now the same budget buys more output than the client has hours to judge. We have to size the production plan to their time.
The second thing we control is how we do the judging. Every SOW we write states the problem and what success looks like. Judging the work against that definition has always had its place, in the hour or two we have with the client each week. That time hasn't grown, but the amount to judge has. So judging needs more of the calendar than it used to. The criteria deserve the same iteration with the client that we would give any concept, because a concept can be judged quickly against criteria the client has argued over. On the concept engagement, we spent more time making concepts than judging them. The client has to be in for the judging.
Where our hours go now
We have always synthesized for the client's audiences, run working sessions meant to end in a decision, and tested with users. What has changed is the ratio. When production was slow, most of a team's hours went to producing, and the rest went to helping the client judge. Production now takes a fraction of the hours it did, so the ratio should move the other way. The client's scarce resource is the hours they can spend judging. Our hours are most valuable where they make the client's hours worth more.
In practice, that means more of our time on synthesis for the client's own audiences, so that what they take upward can be defended by them. It means more time designing working sessions that end in a decision, and more rounds iterating the criteria with the client. It means testing concepts with users before the client has to choose among them, so that what they judge is evidence. It also means keeping fidelity low until an option passes their judgment. A client put this better than I had: a bad idea that has been built out to a prototype is much harder to judge and kill than the same idea on paper, so the existence of a prototype is not a reason to be precious about it. The total hours do not change. The share that goes to production gets smaller.
The plan on file
The point is to produce only as much as the client has time to judge. Most of us have a plan on file that starts with budget and team size. It treats the client's time as something that will be found. It is worth rewriting so that it starts with the client's time.
If you are rewriting yours, message me on LinkedIn.