What I Learned Helping a Client Implement a Major New Feature

Transparency and Accountability Proved Invaluable

In February of this year, the folks at FourthParty.app—a SaaS platform designed to help mediators navigate Alternative Dispute Resolution—wanted my help in building a major new feature. I’ve known Melissa Brogdon, the company’s co-founder and CEO, for a couple years. We met in the Fall 2022 Square One Startup School program. I was an advisor and she was working her way through the program.

For this latest project, they wanted my help building invoicing functionality into the app. This would allow mediators to invoice the parties automatically and involve all of the nuances that go along with legal mediation, like negotiated payment splits.

The whole planning process took about two calendar weeks. Here are the major tasks I took part in over that time:

• Meetings were scheduled 2 or 3 times a week throughout the planning period both to meet team members and to discuss important product decisions around scoping, monetization strategy, and payment method support.

• Planning Work involved two iterative versions of an Implementation Plan, a Decision Document (Using the Atlassian DACI process), and plenty of Wireframing.

• Product Research involved me combing through their Product from a User’s perspective. This was a sort of self-onboarding, but it also allowed me to suggest additional UI/UX improvements. That went well enough on its own that I’m planning to offer that as a standalone service for other clients.

• Non-Billable Research included researching the capabilities of billing software platforms like Stripe & Chargebee, as well as other technologies being considered like Nest.js. This helped inform implementation decisions. Why didn’t I invoice FourthParty for this time? I considered this research to better inform my industry knowledge, which will be beneficial to my consulting services as whole. This differs from the product research mentioned above, which was more specific to this particular project.

• Follow Up Q&A was just about answering questions, clarifying decisions, and giving additional guidance for API flows and user interfaces that weren’t covered in the initial draft of the Implementation Plan.

If you’re not into reading pie charts:

• 2 hours 30 minutes of billable product research

• 7 hours 30 minutes of meetings

• 11 hours of asynchronous planning work

• 2 hours 20 minutes of non-billable research

• 1 hours 30 minutes of follow-up Q&A

Flat rate vs hourly, and the importance of trust

Overall, my role in building this feature came to 22.5 billable hours, for which I invoiced FourthParty every Wednesday. We agreed to an hourly rate, rather than set a flat rate for the entire project, which ended up working really well for both the company and me. Without being boxed in by specific proposal requirements, I could easily pivot and fulfill whatever tasks were needed to make this project a success.

For example, I had to set some time aside to help FourthParty’s team weigh the different ways to accept paper checks. Each option had its own pros and cons. Plus, we had to consider product strategy around building and maintaining support for a dying payment medium. I used the Atlassian DACI process (Driver, Approver, Contributors, and Informed) —a framework to help groups of people make a unified decision. I took this approach because I’ve seen how a thorough decision-making process can allow a team find consensus, without any lingering doubts or hard feelings.

The DACI method worked very well. Everyone on the team had an opportunity to offer their point of view and understood the rationale behind the final decision that was made.

This process even involved some impromptu customer research where I reached out to a lawyer contact of mine to better understand the payment space. It would have been hard to anticipate these steps up front, so there was clear value in the hourly model from my perspective.

In the future, I’ll still prefer to use more explicit proposals that define the desired outcome of a project, but I was happily surprised with how well this more fluid arrangement ended up working out. In time, I’ll get better at anticipating the less predictable variables of a given project, but in this case, I found the agreed hourly rate more forgiving and fair to both parties.

It’s worth noting that the flexible hourly model only ****worked because there was a ton of mutual trust between the client and me. I never wanted them to feel shell shocked by unexpectedly high invoices, hours they weren’t expecting me to put in, or any other kind of surprise costs. Communicating regularly with clients throughout projects—so they know what they’re getting, and what it’s going to cost—is an absolutely essential aspect of a trusting, collaborative relationship.

Some other positive takeaways

Creating and sharing a Notion Teamspace worked out really well and allowed for efficient and seamless collaboration.

There were a lot of detailed product-requirement conversations springing up all over the documents that I created in the Teamspace. And Notion gives you an “inbox” of new changes, which helped me to step through the questions and comments one by one without anything falling through the cracks.

The developer on the team, Garrick Crouch, added plenty of documentation to help to onboard me to the details of the tech stack, database schema, and other useful information. I also did a lot of work with FourthParty’s Chief Revenue Officer Michael Holmes, who was great to interface with. We went back and forth on several important product decisions, he engaged with me on all of the UI/UX discussions, and even made sure the invoices I submitted were paid promptly.

Notion allows plenty of “guest” accounts for free on my one-seat paid plan, so I can continue to host this documentation hub for this client indefinitely. Otherwise, it’s very easy for them to copy/move everything to their own paid account. This means that this will continue to deliver value to their team even if we don’t actively work together in the long-term.

Transparency, flexibility, trust, productive working relationships, and effective tools. All of these proved integral to a making this project a success. Keep an eye out for FourthParty’s next big feature release!