On estimating in ranges

A single-number estimate is a promise about a piece of work you have not done yet. A range is the truth. Most studios quote the promise and then spend the project apologising for the truth.

The pattern is this. The client asks what the project will cost. The studio, wanting to sound confident and decisive, gives a single figure. The figure is a guess dressed as a certainty, made before the brief is fully understood, before the awkward third stakeholder has surfaced, before the content turns out to be late and thin. The project then does what projects do, and the single figure becomes a source of friction: every change is now a negotiation against a number that was never reliable in the first place.

The honest version is a range, and the width of the range is information, not weakness. “This is somewhere between twelve and twenty days” tells the client something true that “this is sixteen days” hides: that the studio can see the shape of the work but not yet its detail, and that the detail is where the uncertainty lives. A client who is going to be good to work with hears that and understands it. A client who insists on a single number before discovery is, more often than not, telling you something useful about how the rest of the project will go.

The part that makes ranges work, rather than just sound nice, is that the range is supposed to narrow. The width at the first conversation reflects how little is known. As discovery does its job, as the brief firms up and the unknowns resolve into either work or not-work, the range tightens. Twelve to twenty becomes fourteen to seventeen becomes a fixed figure the studio is now genuinely willing to stand behind, because by then it is describing work it understands rather than work it is imagining. The narrowing is the deliverable of the discovery phase as much as anything else is. A studio that cannot narrow its range after discovery has not actually done discovery; it has done a kickoff call and called it discovery.

There is a pricing argument underneath this that I have made elsewhere, which is that the day rate is the wrong unit anyway, and that the studios who escape the estimating trap entirely are the ones pricing the outcome rather than the hours. But even within an hours-based model, the range is the more honest instrument, and honesty early is cheaper than honesty late. The cost of admitting uncertainty in the first conversation is a slightly less impressive-sounding quote. The cost of hiding it is a project spent defending a number you knew was soft when you said it.

The objection I hear most is that clients want certainty and a range looks evasive. Some do, and some will. But the studios I respect have found the opposite holds more often than not: a confidently stated range, with a clear account of what would move the number to each end, reads as more expert than a single figure, not less. It is the answer of someone who has done this enough times to know where the surprises hide. Blair Enns at Win Without Pitching makes the broader version of this case, that the studio’s job is to be the expert in the room and to price like one, and the range is a small, daily way of doing exactly that.

Quote the truth. Then narrow it as the truth becomes clearer. The project goes better, and so does the relationship that outlasts it.