The 7-Day Playbook

Every project has four levers: scope, time, cost and quality. Traditional projects fix scope and let time and cost float. That is why they slip — there is no forcing function, so every "small addition" gets absorbed by the schedule until the schedule stops meaning anything.

A 7-day sprint inverts it. Time is fixed. Cost is fixed. Quality is non-negotiable, because a V1 that cannot be maintained is not a V1, it is a demo with a bill attached. That leaves scope as the only thing that can move — so scope is what gets discussed, honestly, on day one, instead of quietly expanding for four months.

This is also why the price is fixed. A day rate rewards the builder for taking longer. A fixed price puts the cost of an over-run on the person who controls the estimate. If the sprint runs long, that is my problem, not a change order.

What a V1 is, and what it is not

A V1 is the smallest thing that does one job end to end, for a real user, in production. It is not a prototype, not a clickable mockup, and not an MVP in the degraded sense the word has acquired — a throwaway built on tooling you will have to escape later.

• It runs on a production stack, on your infrastructure, with your accounts.
• One user journey works completely — signup to the moment of value, with nothing faked in between.
• It can be deployed again tomorrow by someone who is not the person who built it.
• It is small enough that you could throw away half of it without grief, because you will.

The sprint is won or lost before it starts. Day 0 is a single conversation whose only job is to produce a sentence that both sides agree on. Not a spec document — a sentence.

The five questions

1. 1Who is the one user this is for? Not a segment — one person you can name or describe in a sentence. If there are two, pick the one who pays.
2. 2What is the one job they hire this product to do? One verb. "Track", "book", "compare", "publish". If you need "and", you have two products.
3. 3What do they do today instead? A spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group, a competitor, nothing. This tells you what "better" has to mean, and how high the bar actually is.
4. 4What is the single moment where they get the value? Find the screen or action where the user goes "oh, good". Everything in the V1 exists to get them to that moment; everything else is a candidate for the cut list.
5. 5How will you know in 30 days whether this worked? A number, however crude: signups, first paid customer, a demo that closes. If nobody can answer this, the product is not the problem — the bet is.

Answering those five properly takes about forty minutes. Most people have never been made to do it, which is why the answers are usually uncomfortable and always useful.

The output: a one-page scope contract

The conversation ends with one page, signed off before any code is written. It has four parts, and the fourth is the one that matters.

• The product sentence: "For [user], this lets them [one job] so that [outcome]."
• The critical flow: the ordered list of screens and actions from arrival to the value moment. Usually five to nine steps.
• The stack and where it runs, named explicitly, with whose accounts hold what.
• The cut list: everything discussed and deliberately not built, written down by name.