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Most professional services teams have a currency.
Sometimes it's billable hours. Sometimes it's utilization. Sometimes it's revenue.
And sometimes, without realizing it, the metric your team optimizes for becomes the thing customers value least.
That was the challenge facing DBT Labs.
As the company scaled from a boutique consultancy into a rapidly growing SaaS organization, its services team found itself constantly evolving the way it packaged and delivered its expertise.
What started as two-week consulting sprints became buckets of hours. Those buckets evolved into specialized service offerings. Then, eventually, everything collapsed into a single model built around access to expertise rather than consumption of time.
At Propel 26, Erin Vaughan, VP of Customer Services at Propel, and Jess Williams, Director of Professional Services at DBT Labs, shared what they learned along the way.
Their central insight was simple:
Customers don't buy hours. They buy outcomes.
And the faster services organizations align around that reality, the easier it becomes to scale.
Why Selling Hours Eventually Creates Friction
For years, DBT Labs sold professional services the way many organizations still do today: through a bucket-of-hours model.
At the time, it was a significant improvement over their earlier sprint-based consulting approach. Customers gained flexibility. Revenue became more predictable. Services could scale alongside the growing software business.
But as the company expanded, new challenges emerged.
Customers became focused on whether they were "using" their hours correctly.
Teams spent time discussing consumption instead of impact.
Scope conversations revolved around effort rather than outcomes.
And internally, forecasting, staffing, accounting, and project management became increasingly complex.
The problem wasn't that the hours were wrong. The problem was that hours became the focus of the conversation.
When customers think about every hour spent, they're naturally evaluating the cost. When they're thinking about expertise, they're evaluating value.
That's a very different relationship.
How DBT Labs Reframed Services Around Access
Over several years, DBT Labs experimented with different packaging models.
At one point, the team maintained eight separate services SKUs designed to address specific customer scenarios. While this created flexibility, it also introduced complexity for delivery teams, accounting, and customers alike.
Eventually, the company simplified everything into a single offering called Resident Architect Access.
The concept was straightforward.
Instead of purchasing hours, customers purchased access to an experienced DBT architect for a defined period. Under the hood, hours still existed for staffing and planning purposes. But they no longer defined the customer conversation.
That shift fundamentally changed how engagements were framed.
Instead of discussions like:
"We can spend 15 hours building a testing framework."
The conversation became:
"We can help improve data quality, increase trust in analytics, and reduce time spent on manual validation."
Same expertise.
Different value proposition.
And customers responded differently because the focus moved from effort to outcomes.
Why Operational Simplicity Creates Better Customer Experiences
One of the most interesting parts of the session wasn't the packaging change itself.
It was what happened behind the scenes.
As DBT Labs simplified its service model, it also simplified the systems that support delivery.
The team moved through multiple combinations of spreadsheets, project management tools, and time-tracking systems before eventually consolidating on Rocketlane.
That consolidation created something many growing services organizations struggle with:
Visibility.
Sales forecasts flowed directly into staffing plans.
Renewal conversations started earlier.
Resource allocation became more predictable.
Project data became easier to analyze.
Most importantly, everyone worked within the same system rather than stitching together multiple disconnected tools.
The lesson wasn't about software.
It was about operational maturity.
When delivery data lives in one place, organizations spend less time managing work and more time improving it.
How AI Becomes More Valuable When Operations Are Mature
Like many Propel 26 sessions, AI eventually entered the conversation.
But DBT Labs approached AI differently than many organizations.
Instead of starting with AI, they started with process clarity.
Only after simplifying their service model and consolidating delivery data did they begin building AI-powered workflows on that foundation.
Using Rocketlane's flexibility and custom applications, the team created tools that automatically forecast project pacing, surface risks, recommend adjustments, and generate customer-facing guidance.
The result wasn't simply automation.
It was better decision-making.
Resident Architects no longer need to manually calculate pacing or forecast engagement health.
Customers received more consistent guidance.
Leaders gained portfolio-level visibility.
As Erin and Jess emphasized throughout the session, AI is only as valuable as the data beneath it.
- Structured project data.
- Clean systems.
- Consistent processes.
That's what transforms AI from a novelty into a force multiplier.
The Business Impact of Moving Beyond Hours
The strongest validation for the model came from the results.
According to DBT Labs, the Resident Architect Access model helped deliver:
- A 9% increase in billable utilization
- 52% year-over-year growth in attach rates
- Zero change orders after project kickoff
- Faster month-end revenue recognition
- Improved staffing predictability
- Higher employee and customer satisfaction
Just as importantly, the company shifted its relationship with implementation partners.
Instead of competing for project work, the new model allowed DBT Labs to complement partner-led engagements by providing expert guidance where needed.
That's an outcome many service organizations strive for but struggle to achieve.
4 Key Takeaways from Moving Beyond the Bucket
Erin Vaughan and Jess Williams' journey offers several lessons for professional services leaders:
Stop letting hours define the conversation.
Customers care about business outcomes more than effort consumed.
Simplification creates scale.
Reducing service complexity often improves both delivery and customer experience.
Operational maturity comes before AI maturity.
AI creates the most value when it's built on structured data and repeatable processes.
Expertise scales differently from labor.
The strongest services organizations sell access to knowledge, not simply time.
Conclusion
The evolution of DBT Labs' services organization wasn't really about changing SKUs.
It was about changing what the company valued.
Hours still matter behind the scenes. Teams still need staffing models, utilization targets, and forecasting discipline. But customers don't buy those things. They buy expertise. They buy confidence. They buy outcomes.
By shifting from a bucket-of-hours model to an access-based model, DBT Labs changed the conversation from effort to impact. Along the way, they simplified operations, improved forecasting, created a stronger foundation for AI, and delivered better experiences for both customers and employees.
The lesson for service leaders is straightforward.
Don't ask what you're selling.
Ask what your customers believe they're buying.
Because the answer often reveals the real currency of your business.
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