The customer says, "How can I tell you what I want, until you tell me what it will cost?"

The architect says, "How can I tell you how much it will cost, until you tell me what you want? Why don't you tell me how much you can afford, then I will tell you what you can get?"

To which, some customers think, "No way! If I tell you how much I can afford then that is what you will charge and give me as little as you can!"

At this point trust is lost and things deteriorate quickly.

This is perhaps the most common form of the wants trade-off problem.  How much the customer is willing to pay depends on what she can get.  I once bid on a contract for some IT work.  My bid to do what the customer said she wanted was $19 million.  I pointed out that as long as we were doing this work for another $4 million we could also get something else done that I knew was of very high value to the customer and her organization.  Another company bid $17 million to do the originally requested work.  We got the bid, because we looked past the requirements to the wants.

How much dollar value a person puts on satisfying some sub-set of their wants depends on how much want satisfaction they get.  You cannot start with either the want or how much a person can afford.

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