I’ve been thinking a bit recently about what clients are actually trusting you with when they bring you in.
Not in the broad “trust in business matters” sort of way. More in the practical sense of what’s really sitting underneath a project, a product conversation or an advisory role.
Because most of the time, they’re not handing you something neat and finished. They’re not saying, “Here’s a fully formed product strategy” or “Here’s a completely clear brief, just go and execute it.”
Usually it’s much messier than that.
It’s an idea that still needs shaping. A business that knows it needs to modernise but isn’t completely sure where to start. A physical product that could become something more connected, but where the value of that connected layer still needs thinking through. A digital platform project with a lot of moving parts and a fair bit of budget attached to it. A leadership team that knows it needs to make a decision, but isn’t yet convinced it’s asking the right question.
That’s the bit I’ve realised matters.
People aren’t just trusting you to deliver a piece of work. They’re trusting you to step into something that still has a lot of uncertainty around it and help make sense of it before too much time, money and momentum get committed in the wrong direction.
Often the biggest mistakes happen before the build starts
One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that the expensive part of a project isn’t always the obvious bit.
It isn’t always the software build, the platform migration, the manufacturing run, the agency fee or the launch campaign. Sometimes it is, of course, but a lot of the real damage gets done earlier.
It happens when the wrong problem gets defined in the first place. When a business starts comparing platforms, suppliers or features before it’s properly clear what success should actually look like. When a founder has a strong instinct that there’s an opportunity there, but nobody has helped narrow down what the product really is, who it’s for or why it deserves to exist. When a company decides it wants a connected product because the technology is possible, without thinking hard enough about the service around it, the onboarding, the support model, the data, or whether customers will genuinely care.
I’ve seen versions of that across digital projects, product strategy and connected product thinking. The common thread is usually the same: the team moves into solution mode too early.
Once that happens, it gets much harder to ask the more useful questions. Are we solving the right problem? Are we making this more complicated than it needs to be? Does the customer actually care about this feature, this integration or this connected layer as much as we do? Are we choosing a partner because they’re the right fit, or because they’re simply the best at selling confidence in a meeting?
Those are the bits I’ve become much more interested in over time, because they’re often the bits that decide whether the rest of the investment has a chance of paying off.
I’ve sat on both sides of that table
Part of the reason I think about this a lot is because I’ve spent enough time on both sides of it. I’ve been the person selling digital and product work. I’ve also been the person trying to decide where to place bets, what to prioritise, which ideas are worth pursuing, which ones need killing off, and which partners are actually worth trusting with a meaningful budget.
That experience changes how you look at this stuff and makes you more aware of how easy it is for businesses to get swept up in the momentum of doing something. There’s always a platform to choose, an agency to appoint, a roadmap to write, a prototype to get excited about, a feature list to add to, a supplier deck telling you they’ve done it all before. Sometimes all of that is useful. Sometimes it’s just noise wrapped in confidence.
When you’ve lived through enough of it, you get a better feel for where the real risk tends to sit. Often it’s not in whether the work can technically be delivered. It’s in whether the thinking that sits underneath it is solid enough in the first place.
That’s one of the reasons I’m naturally drawn to the earlier, murkier part of the process. The point where a team knows it wants to move, but hasn’t yet worked out the smartest way to do it. The point where a product idea is interesting, but not yet sharp enough. The point where a business is about to spend serious money and needs someone around the table who isn’t trying to sell them a particular platform, build team or delivery model.
What clients are often really buying is judgement
The older I get, the less I think people are buying advice in the abstract. What they usually want is judgement, ideally shaped by a mix of experience and instinct.
Not some grand, all-knowing version of it. Just someone who can help them look at a messy situation more clearly. Someone who can challenge the wrong thing early enough to matter. Someone who can help them see whether the opportunity in front of them is actually one opportunity, or three different ones tangled together. Someone who can say, “I think this part is promising, but I’m not convinced you’ve thought through what happens after that,” before a team disappears too far into delivery.
A lot of that judgement sits in working out what kind of move is right for the stage the business is actually at.
Sometimes the right answer is to do more homework: spend more time understanding the customer problem, pressure-testing the proposition properly, or digging deeper into whether there’s enough product-market fit to justify the investment being discussed.
Sometimes the right answer is the opposite. Stop overthinking it, trust your instincts, and get something out into the world.
And sometimes it sits somewhere in the middle. A test-and-learn approach might be the right call, but even then there’s judgement in how far you really need to go. Do you need a proper prototype, a polished MVP and months of build time, or could you learn enough from something much lighter? A landing page, a bit of smoke-and-mirrors marketing, a scrappy concierge-style service behind the scenes, a pre-order experiment, a pilot with the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), or a stripped-back version of the offer that tells you whether the appetite is actually there before you commit too heavily.
That’s the bit I find interesting, because there usually isn’t one universal playbook. There are a handful of routes you can take, but the right one depends on the stage of the company, the level of risk, the cost of being wrong, how much conviction already exists, and what you’re actually trying to learn.
Sometimes that means helping shape a proposition or a product direction. Sometimes it means helping a business decide whether a digital transformation project is really one project or five smaller ones that need sequencing properly. Sometimes it means pressure-testing whether a connected product idea actually has a commercial model around it, or whether the cleverness of the product has run ahead of the value it creates. Sometimes it means helping a client choose the right partner rather than the flashiest one.
That’s why I’ve never really seen this work as simply “consulting”, even though from the outside it probably looks like that a lot of the time.
The useful bit, at least for me, tends to happen before everything is tidied up into a scope of work. It happens when there’s still room to influence the thinking, not just react to it.
That’s why I take the trust bit seriously
I suppose that’s the real point underneath all of this. When somebody asks you to help with a product, a proposition, a connected service, a digital project or a strategic decision, they’re usually trusting you with more than the line item on the proposal.
They’re trusting you with their uncertainty. Their budget. Their momentum. Their half-formed idea. Their hope that this thing they’re about to invest in might actually become something meaningful and commercially worthwhile.
And because I’ve been around enough of those decisions, I know how much usually sits behind them. I know that for a founder or leadership team, it’s rarely just “another project”. It’s usually a bet of some kind. Sometimes a financial one, sometimes a reputational one, sometimes just a bet that this is the right use of the next six or twelve months of effort.
That’s why I’m increasingly interested in the work that happens before the obvious work starts.
The part where the idea still needs sharpening. The part where the roadmap still needs challenging.
The part where the connected product still needs a proper reason to exist. The part where a business needs someone sensible in the room before it disappears too far into solution mode.
That’s the bit I enjoy most now, and probably the bit I value most too. Not because it’s neat. Usually it isn’t.
But because if you can help someone make a better decision at that stage, you can save a lot of wasted effort later on and give the good ideas a much better chance of becoming something real.
