Listen for the sentence they keep repeating

In a kickoff call people will say the important thing three or four times without noticing. A skincare founder told me across forty minutes that her products “felt warmer than they looked”. She said it about the packaging, then about her website, then about a trade show stand. She had written none of it in the brief, which asked for a refreshed logo.

That repeated sentence became the entire project. We did not touch the logo for six weeks. We spent them photographing her formulations in changing daylight, because the gap she kept describing was between how the products felt in the hand and how flat they looked in pictures.

Deliverables are the last thing to agree

I now split the first phase of every engagement in two. The first half is diagnosis and produces nothing a client can put on a slide. The second half proposes what to actually make. Clients find this uncomfortable for about a week, and then they stop asking about the logo.

The risk is obvious: you can diagnose forever and never make anything. So I timebox it hard. Two weeks, a written summary, and a recommendation the client can say no to. If they say no, we have lost two weeks. If they say yes, we have avoided building the wrong thing for four months.