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THE LESSON LEARNED
We believe every story our guests have shared has their own touch, and their own lessons to learn from. However, it seems that there are a couple of lessons that keep coming up, and that’s why they deserve their own separate page for you to take notes on.
This episode of Client Horror Stories opens with light banter between host Morgan Friedman and longtime UX and product strategist Tamara Adlin, but quickly settles into a story that reshaped how Tamara chooses clients and structures her work.
Tamara Adlin was brought in to help a blockchain startup build smart contracts—but quickly realized the team was rushing ahead without a solid foundation. Her efforts to slow things down for long-term success clashed with the founders’ chaos, leading to a hard but necessary split.
Melinda's nightmare with a rogue procurement officer taught her a core business truth: cash-flow terms matter as much as the contract itself. The chaos resolved, but the lesson stuck: don't absorb a corporation's dysfunction—push the tension back to their side. It's a reminder that experience teaches the real skill: trust your instincts and protect your boundaries.
Melinda Spaulding was blindsided when a client suddenly tried to cancel their contract over billing terms—despite everyone having already agreed on them. What followed was a confusing scramble that ultimately proved the original terms were never the issue at all.
In this episode of Client Horror Stories, host Morgan Friedman sits down with Sheila Butler, a seasoned hospitality and marketing executive, to dissect a project that began with enormous promise and ended up colliding with technical failures, mismatched vendor expectations, and, fatefully, the global shutdown of March 2020.
Sheila Butler faces a huge launching issue which has become blocked by so many factors even we wouldn't expect.