Scott Bush

I’ve learned a lot in my life, the vast major­ity of it far less use­ful than the lit­tle gems that are worth know­ing. (An exam­ple of the use­less stuff: the Kon­ami code. Will I ever for­get “up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, select, start”?) One of the gems that repeat­edly comes up when work­ing with clients and project stake­hold­ers is this:

The short answer is always “Yes.”

I first heard this indis­pens­able phrase from Chad Estes. He was my boss at an Inter­net start-up called Echo­space where i worked at the end of and for years fol­low­ing col­lege. We had a tech­nol­ogy called “Sin­glePage” back in 2001 that was essen­tially what AJAX is today: the abil­ity to load new data in a web­page with­out refresh­ing the entire page. Big-time stuff back then.

As a start-up, we were eager for clients. I attended a few early “pitch” meet­ings with a large com­pany (who shall go unnamed here) and they had requests for all kinds of things for the site we were propos­ing to build for them. One of our devel­op­ers lis­tened to these requests, frowned and started shak­ing his head. “No, that would require too many HTTP requests,” he said (or some­thing sim­i­lar but equally “techie”). Chad inter­vened and said that we’d look into a way to do that for them and the meet­ing con­tin­ued. In the end, we secured them as a client and built a great prod­uct for them, but after­wards Chad addressed the entire company—all eight of us—and taught us the phrase above.

“No mat­ter what a client or a poten­tial client asks for,” he said (though I admit I’m para­phras­ing; my memory’s not per­fect), “the short answer is always ‘Yes.’ We want them to see us as capa­ble, get-it-done peo­ple. Even if they ask for the impos­si­ble, we can do it.” It sounds like a recipe for dis­as­ter, as every­one has sto­ries of the boss who over-promised fea­tures on behalf of devel­op­ers who knew the impos­si­ble couldn’t be accom­plished given the con­straints. And that’s when Chad explained the corol­lary to this phrase.

“We can always tell them later that what they want will require addi­tional time, money, or resources. But before we do that, we have to build in them a sense of con­fi­dence about us. And,” he added, look­ing at me (I was a tech­ni­cal writer and client man­ager at Echo­space), “if we clearly com­mu­ni­cate the issues and con­straints, they will bet­ter under­stand what they’re ask­ing and either agree to the addi­tional time, money, or what­ever; or they’ll change their mind on their own with­out us hav­ing told them ‘no, we can’t do that.’”

It’s great advice. Though some might argue it’s dis­hon­est, I dis­agree. It’s a mat­ter of per­cep­tion: any fea­ture or tool can be built (espe­cially on the web); it’s just a mat­ter of pri­or­ity and resources. Say­ing “yes” to a request isn’t dishonest—it’s smart. It lets you con­tinue the dia­log with the client, refine what they’re ask­ing for, and be up front about the require­ments to bring that fea­ture to reality.

I’ve used the phrase dozens and dozens of times in my career, and I don’t antic­i­pate it becom­ing any less use­ful in the future. As long as it’s used with integrity and hon­esty, it can only serve you well.

So do you think you can start using this phrase when deal­ing with your clients and col­leagues? (…you should have already said “Yes” by now.)