[cat9]

It's been a huge learning process for me around "the engineering side of this is relatively simple, and the non-engineering side of this is relatively simple, so they'd put two and two together themselves...right?"

But the reality is that the above is almost never what happens, even when the task required is limited to strictly marketing / sales / engineering, rather than requiring some combination of the above to be executed simultaneously and well.

If you can walk in, talk to each of the different groups involved, understand their separate needs, design a mutually acceptable solution, and then get the thing to actually be done - that is absurdly valuable, and you should bill accordingly.