Gate 0: Discovery & Alignment
3-5 days- Lock KPI, owner, and access; no KPI, no start
- Map data sources, constraints, security requirements
- Draft acceptance criteria and week-2 demo slice
How we work
Governance over theater. Stop-rules baked in.
Every phase has a gate. Miss it, we pause or change course. Week-2 live slice, weekly demos, rollback rehearsed, and a KPI we’re accountable to.
Decision gates
Each gate has a pass/fail. If we miss a gate, we stop, fix, or pivot before spending another dollar.
Gate 1: Architecture & Plan
3-7 days- Select stack, observability, and controls
- Sequence milestones with decision dates
- Publish rollback paths and non-negotiables
Gate 2: Build & Demo
Weekly cadence- Ship vertical slices behind flags
- Week-2 live slice; if missed, pause and fix
- Weekly demos with risks and deltas vs KPI
Gate 3: Hardening & Launch
1-2 weeks- Load, perf, and resiliency checks
- Runbooks, alerts, and SLOs in place
- Cutover with rollback rehearsed; miss SLO twice → revert
Quality, risk, and escalation
- Definition of Done: tests, accessibility, performance budgets enforced.
- Secure-by-default: CSP headers, no inline creds, secrets managed.
- Observability wired before launch: logs, metrics, alerts with owners.
- Rollback ready: rehearsed paths, not just a paragraph in a doc.
- Escalation: two consecutive misses on KPI/SLO triggers fix-only mode.
Our guarantees
- Week-2 live slice or we pause and fix before proceeding
- Weekly demos with acceptance criteria and KPI delta
- Two strikes on SLOs (uptime/latency) → fix-only until green
- Security, accessibility, and rollback baked into definition of done