had a client ask me last week:
"can we just change this dropdown to a multi-select? should be a 5 minute fix, right?"
to someone who doesn't code, it's just text on a screen.
what they don't see:
- schema update
- broken api endpoints
- refactoring state
- new edge cases
i used to just say yes, eat the 4 hours of extra work, and regret it later.
explaining the backend complexity to a non-tech client never works. they just think you're overcomplicating things or making excuses.
what finally worked for me is setting a hard rule: once a milestone is approved, any change to it either waits for phase 2, or uses an extra revision credit.
the second there is a visible limit, clients suddenly stop thinking every idea is a "quick tweak".
how do you handle clients who think full feature rewrites only take 5 minutes?
