What a scope document owes a client
We write the terms of reference before the proposal, and we let the client argue with it. Here is the reasoning.
Most studios send a proposal first. It is a sales document wearing the clothes of a plan: a paragraph of flattery, a list of deliverables, a number, and a signature line. The client agrees to the number long before either party agrees on what the work is.
We invert it. Before any figure is discussed, we write a terms of reference: what is being made, what it must do, what it explicitly excludes, what we are assuming, and what we need from you and when. The client reads it, edits it, disputes it. Only when that document is settled does a proposal exist.
The document has to be arguable
A scope nobody can push back on is not a scope, it is a press release. Ours is editable on the client's side — they can annotate the schedule, question an assumption, and put a counter-figure against the budget with their reasoning attached. That is not a weakness in the process; it is the process. Every disagreement surfaced during scoping is a disagreement that does not surface during delivery, when it costs money.
Every assumption you do not write down will be discovered later, by the person it hurts most.
What belongs in it
- The outcome, stated as something observable rather than as an adjective.
- The exclusions. Naming what is not in scope is more useful than a longer list of what is.
- Assumptions with owners — every 'we assume X' has a name attached to whoever can confirm it.
- The decision points: where the client has to choose, and what happens to the schedule if they do not.
- The dependency list: content, access, approvals, third-party accounts.
- What is handed over at the end, and in what form.
Why price comes last
We price the work from the work, not from the client's sector or the size of their round. That is only possible when the shape of the engagement is agreed first. It also removes the least dignified conversation in this industry — the one where a studio quietly reduces the quality of the work to defend a number it named before it understood the problem.
We do not publish a minimum figure. Not because we are being coy, but because a number without a scope is theatre. The shape of the work sets the figure, and the shape is the thing we agree first.
What this costs us
It is slower to win work this way. A client comparing three studios will get two proposals with numbers in forty-eight hours and one document from us asking harder questions. Some of them go elsewhere, and that is a fair trade: an engagement that was won by being fastest to a number is usually the one that goes wrong in month three.
For the ones who stay, the effect is measurable in the least glamorous way possible: fewer change orders, fewer surprised faces, and a delivery conversation that is about the work rather than about the contract.