The Six-Week Rule: How We Scope Every New Engagement

Almost every engagement we scope starts with a six-week first phase, regardless of how large the eventual project will be. It's not an arbitrary number — it's roughly the longest span where a client and our team can both still hold the entire scope in their heads at once.

Longer first phases tend to drift. Requirements shift, someone's priorities change at the client, and by week ten the thing being built has quietly diverged from the thing that was scoped, without anyone deciding that on purpose.

Six weeks is also long enough to ship something real. Not a prototype that gets thrown away, but a working slice of the actual product, deployed, that the client's team can put in front of real users or stakeholders before committing to the next phase.

We've broken the rule exactly a handful of times, always for regulated industries where a compressed compliance review made a shorter phase impractical. Every one of those exceptions took longer than we planned. We haven't broken it since without a very good reason.