Adding Soul to the System
summary
A contracting playbook documents moving from time‑and‑materials (19 APIs estimated) to a failed low bid that grows to 135 APIs over two years, then to a story‑point price that balloons overhead, to an overengineered reporting invoice calculated to the third decimal, and finally to a simple fixed team fee plus quarterly objectives and a discretionary bonus tied to measurable and soft goals. The final model reduces meeting overhead, restores engineering time, improves business–dev alignment, and proves successful in repeated quarterly iterations with tangible value.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Business and DevOps introduction
- 2:09DevOps relationship challenges
- 3:11Time and materials failure case
- 5:43Story points pricing drawbacks case
- 8:35Train domain DevOps case
- 10:20Over-engineering contracting
- 11:04Team fee model with shared risk
- 13:56New contracting outcomes
- 16:39Adding soul through conversations
- 18:26Unlearning corporate metrics
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