I want to start with a confession. As a consultant, there is nothing easier than saying yes.
When a stakeholder comes to us with a tight deadline and a massive feature list, saying yes makes everyone smile. The contract gets signed, the kick-off meeting is a celebration, and the adrenaline starts pumping. It feels like momentum.
But over the years, I’ve learned that a quick yes is often the precursor to a slow, painful failure.
We work with some of the most ambitious consumer brands in the world. I talk to the stakeholders and C-level executives every day, and believe me—I know the pressure you are under. You have board members asking about Q4 projections, competitors launching new features, and a team that is already stretched thin. When you come to an agency, you aren't looking for friction; you are looking for relief.
However, the industry is full of Yes-Men agencies that will agree to impossible timelines and flashy solutions just to close the deal. They solve your immediate anxiety, but they often create a much bigger problem down the road: a fragmented customer experience, spiraling maintenance costs, and a website so bogged down by technical debt that innovation becomes impossible.
At Nebulab, we take a different approach. It’s an approach that often surprises our clients initially, but it’s also the reason they stay with us for years.
Who's Running Your Website?
In too many brands, the digital experience is everyone's playground and no one's responsibility. The idea of a dedicated "CEO of the Website" who orchestrates this entire dance sounds great in theory, but in practice, that role is often split across five people who already have full-time jobs.
Here's what a typical week can look like when working with a fast-paced brand:
- Monday morning, the CMO pushes for a site-wide redesign of product pages—cleaner layouts, bigger imagery, more white space to elevate the brand's premium positioning.
- Tuesday, the CRO proposes an A/B test to add "Frequently Bought Together" modules and size recommendations to those same product pages to boost AOV.
- Wednesday, the CEO comes back from a board meeting: "We need to integrate our new virtual try-on tool on product pages before the investor update. They want to see us innovating with AI."
Each request makes perfect sense from the perspective of each executive. But what's completely missing is a systems-wide view of the website.
That's where we step in. Rather than jumping head-first into design and coding, we ask, "Does this ladder up to a coherent digital strategy?".
The Trap of the Big Redesign
Let’s look at a concrete example of where a Yes-Man agency can hurt you.
Clients often come to us asking for a redesign. Perhaps their conversion rate is not where they'd like it to be, or a competitor just launched a brand new website and the FOMO is eating them alive.
For a typical agency, this is the holy grail of projects: huge scope, fat retainer, flashy portfolio piece.
Unfortunately, redesigns are also terrible for your risk profile: the more you change, the more you increase the chances that something will go wrong. And with no data to understand the impact of individual changes, it's very hard to understand what's causing the underperformance.
So, when a client asks for a new website, we lead with curiosity instead. We dig into the data, we talk to stakeholders, we talk to their customers.
What we often find is that uprooting their existing experience is too expensive and unnecessarily risky. In such cases, we advocate for a more scientific approach where we shift your budget from a high-risk gamble to a series of incremental experiments.
While certainly more boring, this approach minimizes risk while maximizing your shots-on-goal, and often yields better ROI than a six-month redesign.
Pushback is Love
This brings me to the core of how we work. For us, consultancy is the art of benevolent pushback.
But let me be clear: this isn't about being obstructionist, and it certainly isn't about taking control of your company. You are the decision-maker. Our job is to ensure you make those decisions with your eyes wide open.
When we challenge a request, we are laying out the trade-offs:
- We warn you if a shortcut creates "technical debt" that will slow you down next year.
- We highlight if a feature bloat distracts from your core value proposition.
- We advise against rigid plans when the market data tells us to pivot.
But once we have presented the risks and offered our best counsel, it's still up to you to make the call.
And should you still decide to move forward with your original plan, well... We're happy to disagree and still commit. There's a time to challenge and there's a time to execute.
Stewards, Not Vendors
I understand why C-levels are wary of agencies. You’ve likely been burned by vendors who over-promised and under-delivered, or who required so much hand-holding that it felt like you were working for them.
We aim for the opposite. In fact, we want to be stewards of your business.
When you hire Nebulab, you aren't just hiring a pair of hands to design pixels and write code. You are hiring a partner who will lose sleep over your conversion rates. You are hiring a team that has the experience to look you in the eye and say, "I know how much you want this feature, but if we rush it, it will break your Black Friday sale. Let’s postpone it instead."
It takes humility to serve, but it takes courage to lead. We strive to do both.
If you are looking for someone to just say "Yes," there are plenty of other agencies out there who will happily oblige. But if you are looking for someone to help you navigate the chaos, clarify your vision, and build a resilient business—we should talk.
