Writing
I covered two roles for free on a small project because I was already there and it saved them a cost. The project stopped, which was reasonable. What I did not expect was what it cost me.
Paid work leaves a page like this, dated and totalled. A favour leaves nothing to look up. Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Collection.
A manufacturer I was working with wanted to replace an internal tool. An org manager: a directory of the business that their own people used, and that vendors and resellers used too, to work out who they needed to deal with. The existing one had aged badly.
It was a small piece of work, and the whole point of it was to stay cheap. They were building it with their own developers rather than asking us to supply any, on the view that a couple of their people could fit it around their other work. What they had no answer for was design and business analysis.
So I offered to cover both. I was already there and already being paid, and it seemed like an obvious way to save them a cost they did not need to carry. Everyone was pleased. It felt like the right thing to do.
Since they were low on budget, they agreed to deploy their own developers and they worked on it for about a month. Fairly early on we raised concerns about how the build was going, on both pace and quality. The expectation on their side was that the team would find its feet. It did not.
Then the budget ran out and the tool was shelved. That is a legitimate thing to have happened. Small internal projects stop all the time, and the money genuinely was not there.
What I did not expect was the other consequence. The relationship with that stakeholder had been very good for a long time, and afterwards it was cooler. Nothing was said, and there was nothing to say. It did not recover.
Most of the ordinary explanations do not apply here, which is why it took me so long to see what did.
The project was well managed. Sieya ran it, and I want to be specific about that rather than polite. When timelines moved, she said so in the week it happened rather than at the next checkpoint. When build quality became a concern, she put it in front of the people who could act on it and kept it there. None of the trouble that followed was a surprise to anyone who had been reading her updates.
The design need was modest. A directory with a handful of screens does not require a specialist, and I am decent rather than exceptional, which was a fair match for what the thing needed. Where the designs fell short of what they had pictured, we had discussed it in the open rather than discovering it at the end.
The delivery risk was raised early, by us. Concerns about pace and quality reached the right people within the first few weeks. They were heard, and the decision was to let the team find its feet and to deal with it if they did not. That is a legitimate call. Being warned and choosing to wait is an ordinary way for a project to fail, and it leaves a record of who decided what.
So: managed properly, resourced appropriately for its size, flagged in good time. Everything that stopped the project had a name and a date attached to it. My part had neither, and that is the part that left a residue.
Volunteering for two roles gave me the ownership that comes with them and none of the standing.
A designer and a business analyst are not only pairs of hands. Each arrives with a remit that lets them push back on scope, argue for time, or decline to start until something is settled. Absorbing both informally meant the output was mine while every decision about budget, timing and scope stayed elsewhere.
It also meant there was no paper. Paid work produces a trail: a scope, an estimate, criteria, a note when something moves. When paid work goes wrong the trail carries part of the weight, because there is a record of what was agreed and when it changed. An unpriced contribution generates none of that. It exists only as a favour somebody remembers being offered.
The instinct came from somewhere, and it is worth naming, because it is the same instinct that makes people good at this work.
Pre-sales is unpriced work as a profession. Discovery, solutioning, estimates, proposals, workshops, prototypes: all of it handed over before anyone has committed to anything, on the expectation that some proportion of it comes back. Being willing to give something away in advance is not a weakness in the role. It is the central competence of it, and after enough years the judgement becomes automatic.
That instinct does not switch off when you step inside a delivery engagement. It is the same reflex applied where the economics are entirely different. In a pre-sales setting the downside of unpriced work is a wasted week. Inside a live account, the same reflex spends the asset the whole role runs on.
Which is why I would not describe what I did as unusually generous. It was the ordinary behaviour of the job, used in the one place where it does not pay.
Generosity and risk are felt at different times. The offer lands immediately, reads as helpfulness and saves a visible cost. The risk lands at the end, when people are deciding what a failure reflects on, and by then the offer is months old and no longer part of anyone's thinking.
Free work is worth most when a relationship is thin. As trust builds the return falls away, while the downside grows.
The asymmetry I missed sits underneath that one. Free work is worth most when a relationship is thin, because there is still access and benefit of the doubt to buy. As trust builds the return falls away, while the downside stays the same size or grows, because there is more to lose.
That relationship was a good one, built over the past year. I gave two roles into it and put it at risk to save them a single modest hire. It is a poor trade from any angle, and I made it without noticing that a trade was being made.
The lesson is not that you should refuse. Filling a gap is often the right call, and the alternative here was probably that nothing got built.
The question I would ask first is what the gift is meant to buy, and whether the downside is proportionate to it. Access I do not have. A judgement I want to influence. A piece of work I want to be considered for. If the honest answer is that there is nothing specific, because the relationship is already sound, then the offer costs something and buys very little.
Only once that holds would I bother describing it: what is being covered, what standard is reasonable at that level of resourcing, and what happens to it if the budget tightens. Not a contract. A few lines that exist somewhere other than a conversation.
When nobody wants to write it down, I take that as information. It usually means the saving is welcome and the compromise is not.
The offer was well meant. That is exactly why it never occurred to me to document it.
Writing down the terms of a favour feels like the opposite of doing someone a favour, and that instinct is the problem. Nothing about the goodwill required the scope to stay vague. I could have been generous and precise at the same time, and I chose only the first because the second felt ungracious.
Client details left out deliberately.
Worth reading
Blair Enns put the sharper version of this in The Win Without Pitching Manifesto. Free work isn't generosity, it's a transfer of power.