Contract Management Pro  /  Scope Triage

The three-bucket framework
At scale, prioritisation without explicit criteria becomes political. These buckets gave the team a shared language for hard trade-offs.
01
Ship Now
Committed scope. Frozen design. Trust gates cleared.
What qualified
Mocks signed off before dev story opened
DERT review completed for AI features
No platform dependency blocking release
Accessibility audit passed or in-flight
02
Design Debt
Known gap. Deferred deliberately. Owned, not abandoned.
What landed here
Technical blocker emerged after design freeze
Scope descoped at BRP but design complete
Platform dependency owned by another team
UX direction changed mid-sprint
03
North Star
Vision work. Direction-setting. Protects against myopic shipping.
What qualified
Concept validated in design critique
Anchors 2–3 release cycles of decisions
Cross-surface or cross-BU alignment needed
Not committed to any release yet
The gate between Debt and Ship Now
Design debt only moved to Ship Now once mocks were frozen, DERT cleared, and the sprint planning ceremony confirmed eng capacity. No exceptions. This rule came directly from the Aug 2025 retro.
Why debt was not failure
Every item in Design Debt had an owner, a reason, and a target release. Naming it rather than quietly shipping a degraded version was itself a design decision.
Why North Star was not wishful thinking
Vision work ran in critique sessions, not side projects. It kept individual feature decisions coherent across a 3-person team spanning 5 surfaces over two releases.