The eleven questions before a quote
Scope creep starts in the first email, not the third month. These questions surface the real project, and occasionally end the conversation early.
By Robin Vale
Scope creep has a reputation as something that happens in month three. It does not. It happens in the first email, when both sides agree to a project neither has described, and then spend three months discovering they meant different things.
These are the questions that surface the real project before a number gets attached to it.
The eleven
- What happens if you do nothing? If the answer is “not much”, the project will lose its budget to something with a deadline.
- Who has to say yes? Not who briefs me — who can stop this. Find the second name now rather than in week four.
- What has already been tried? There is almost always a previous attempt. What killed it is the most useful information in the room.
- What does success look like in a number? Not “a better experience”. A number, a direction, and roughly by when.
- Who are the users, and when did you last speak to one? The gap between those two answers predicts most of the difficulty.
- What is genuinely fixed? Brand, platform, a date, an integration. Constraints are fine; discovering them late is not.
- Who builds it? Design handed to a team that cannot build it is expensive theatre.
- What is the real deadline, and what is behind it? A conference, a funding round, an arbitrary quarter. The reason tells you how movable it is.
- What are you not willing to change? Usually more revealing than what they want changed.
- How will we decide when we disagree? Agree the tiebreaker before there is a tie.
- What would make you regret hiring me? People answer this honestly, and the answer is the thing to manage for the whole engagement.
Ending conversations early is the point
Two or three of these questions regularly end a conversation before a proposal is written. That reads like lost work. It is not. A project where nobody can name the decision-maker, or where success has no number, is a project that ends badly for both sides after months of effort.
The eleven questions take forty minutes. Finding out the same things in month three takes the project.
Write the answers down
Put them in the proposal, in the client’s own words. Not as a contract clause — as a shared record of what both of you believed at the start. When the scope shifts later, and it will, the conversation is about a documented change rather than a disagreement about memory.
