Melissa Perri recently shared a powerful insight: the confusion between product and project management isn’t a role definition problem—it’s a leadership problem.
Her core observation: When executives ask “are we on schedule?” instead of “are we solving the right problems?”, they create organisations where delivery matters more than direction. Teams get reduced to coordinators, and discovery gets squeezed into sprint zeros.
But here’s what’s specific to construction:
This isn’t just a cultural preference. It’s baked into the business model.
Construction operates on hourly billing and project-based pricing. This creates a perverse incentive: the more you improve at your job, the less you earn. Finishing a design faster means billing fewer hours. Delivering a project on schedule means the revenue window closes sooner.
So the industry developed rational cultural norms around “using available hours” because that maximises revenue. It’s not laziness—it’s a logical response to the incentive structure.
And because the business model only rewards delivery, project managers dominate. Leadership naturally asks operational questions: “What’s the schedule? How many hours? What’s the margin?” Not strategic questions: “What are we building capabilities toward? How do we compound value across projects? What outcomes are we guaranteeing?”
This cascades into everything:
- How firms scope work (discrete projects, not capabilities)
- How teams think about solutions (“better tools” instead of “different or re-thinking the problems”)
- How innovation gets funded (“500 hours to deliver” instead of “2 weeks to learn if this works”)
- What metrics leadership tracks (billable utilisation instead of customer outcomes)
The system makes perfect sense—until you realise the business model is misaligned with where value actually lives.
Here’s the thing:
When AI collapses effort but maintains value, input-based pricing becomes nonsensical. Other industries are already making the shift. Legal firms are moving from hourly billing to outcome-based pricing.
A question for construction leaders:
What would change if you priced outputs instead of inputs? If you guaranteed the outcome (buildings that meet performance criteria) rather than consumed hours? What questions would your teams ask? What would leadership measure?
The problem Melissa identified—organisations choosing delivery over direction—isn’t inevitable in construction. It’s structural.
Which means it’s fixable.