After being given the advice couple years ago, I found it to be applicable to quite a number of scenarios me and my colleagues faced. In my experience its pretty solid!
There is another trick that I use when I don't control the dev team. For example, say the company has outsourced a pricing app to a third party dev shop, in this case any decision I can make that will make the app more "table-y" I make. So instead of defining control flow to determine price for any given object, what I do is I get them to make a "rules engine" that can operate on the major variables that are typically used to make decisions. That way fine tuning changes can be done on our side, and it doesn't rack up billables. I think this is called "table based design" but Googling for it isn't showing anything.