Field Notes
Essays from inside a 120-person digital agency on Jira — written by Ernest. Project margin, estimating, the architecture of profitability, and the small decisions that compound. No content marketing.
Showing project margin numbers to project managers and engineers feels like a transparency win. In practice it produces a measurable productivity drop in the first quarter, a measurable trust erosion in the second, and a slow rebuild over the third. Manager view — the same metric, expressed in a unit the role can actually act on — is the version of transparency that pays back.
Most agencies pay their sales team a percentage of invoiced revenue. The structure rewards landing big estimates and ignores whether those estimates were profitable to deliver. The math, the behaviour change it produces, and the bonus structure that fixes it without a 30%-pay-cut conversation.
Every agency has Development work, Support work, and Internal work — but most agencies report on them as one thing. Until they're separated, support quietly subsidises development, internal time disappears, and margin reads wrong on every line. The structural fix and the conversation each sub-project type needs.