How We Price Multi-Discipline Engagements (and Why Hourly Billing Fails)

Hourly billing creates a perverse incentive: the more efficient you get at a problem, the less you earn for solving it. We felt that tension most on multi-discipline engagements, where a brand sprint, a marketing launch, and a software build all had wildly different effort-to-value ratios.

We moved to value-based, milestone-priced engagements instead. Each phase — discovery, design, build, launch — is scoped and priced against its outcome, not the hours it consumes internally. What we deliver, and by when, is fixed up front.

Scoping this way forces a better discovery process. We can't price a milestone we haven't defined clearly, which means the client gets a much sharper spec before any work begins — a side benefit that hourly billing never forced us to produce.

It also changes how we staff engagements. Under hourly billing, adding a more senior (and faster) person to a project can shrink the invoice. Under value pricing, we can put our best people on a problem without that tradeoff.

The model isn't right for every engagement — pure exploratory research is still time-boxed — but for anything with a definable deliverable, it aligns what we're paid for with what the client actually needed.