Cut scope before it bloats

The firehose problem

Ideas arrive from everywhere — an AI-generated PRD, customer requests, competitor gaps, your own backlog. Each one feels reasonable in isolation, and if you keep them all you get a bloated build that takes twice as long and ships half as sharp.

The instinct to “just add it” is how v1 becomes v3 before it launches. The discipline is deciding what NOT to build — and that's hard to do without a filter.

Goals as the filter

Cadenly's Scope Refinement takes the whole firehose, drafts the business goals your scope should serve — Core, Competitive, Customer, Visionary — and aligns each requirement to the goals it advances. Anything that serves no goal is flagged as a cut candidate.

The output is every requirement mapped, scored on impact and effort, phased, and marked keep or cut — a smaller, sharper scope you can defend, with the cuts documented so nobody relitigates them next week.

Phasing beats deleting

Cutting doesn't mean discarding. A goal you push to a later phase pulls its requirements with it, so ambitious ideas survive as “not now” rather than “no.” That's how you keep the vision without drowning the first release.