“Like so many shops, we would get caught in the scoping trap. Basically, we would practice traditional scoping, clients would dictate the budget, and then we’d try to hit that or come under. That means the statement of work would get signed, and only then would the team find out what’s at stake. That’s when you hear reactions like, ‘Whoa, this is not how we would go about it. It’s missing a lot of details. The timeline is all off. You’re gonna need a lot more budget. And hey, we still have a couple of dozen questions to clarify.’” These are the words of Peter Kang, co-founder and CEO at Barrel, an agency that works closely with clients of Shopify Plus, helping build and expand their ecommerce presence. In our interview in December 2021, he described some of the challenges that his agency had been facing. The team at Barrel came to question many widely-held assumptions regarding project scope, the role of the customer in the creative process, and the way teams, managers, and clients interact in high-pressure projects. You might also like: The Ultimate Guide to Finding Web Design Clients . Our relationship with scope: It’s complicated “The work we do for Shopify Plus clients varies,” Kang says. “Sometimes they are not huge builds, but they are ongoing projects, and they all involve many roles, designers, developers, content folks, all with different levels of involvement, depending on the project. It’s vital to be flexible when you’re working with Shopify Plus customers because that’s a big piece of the puzzle of being in this ecosystem. It’s all about their fast-growing businesses. They have a lot of evolving needs, and our job is to cater to them, whether it’s on a retainer basis or project by project. But even with our best clients, scope is always the hardest part to manage.” It’s not for lack of trying, Kang explains, but rather, some broken assumptions about what scope really means. With traditional scoping, there is a person somewhere who figures it out—one singular person, often a sales lead or a project manager. The general belief is that just this one person is needed to understand the scope. But usually, they are not the ones who will be doing the work. Regardless of how well-informed this individual is, it’s a setup for failure, because even if you are that person, the scope is not going to be what you think it is. If you look back at any completed project, you’ll see that the end product was a collaboration between multiple roles and the client’s often-changing needs and feedback; whether you like it or not, scope is a team sport. Scope has to be what everybody, together, thinks it is. And that seems like an impossibly chaotic idea. When confronted with this, a project lead is going to say, “I will own the scope and tell everyone else what it is.” But that’s the fundamental problem. When one person somehow claims, “I own the scope”, then it means that nobody else does. The reality is that scope is not defined until everyone understands it in the same way. And this demands that first, everyone on the team, including the leads, should be involved in fully mapping out what that work is going to be. Then, to make it truly complete, you must involve the customer, too. Customers are generally the ones with the greatest vested interest in the project but traditionally the least insight into the scope’s many implications and details. Kang admits that like many Shopify shops, his agency was not really enjoying success in terms of being in control of their projects. There was a lot of disconnection that they weren’t even aware of, especially disconnects between the creative and technical people who were building the sites and the principals who were talking with the clients and then doing the scoping. Sometimes they, the principals, might loop in a couple of team members to ask specific questions about how a particular thing was done, but for everything else, they would simply ballpark the estimate or refer to older projec...