# Scope hammering Scope hammering is the [[Shape Up]] practice of forcefully questioning every part of a design or implementation so the work fits inside its fixed time box. Ryan Singer chose "hammering" over "cutting" to convey how much force it takes: scope keeps growing while you build, so it has to be pushed back repeatedly, not trimmed once. Questions to ask about each piece: - Is this a must-have? Could we ship without it? - What happens if we don't do it? - Is this a new problem, or one people already live with today? - How likely is this case, is it core or an edge case, and what's the real impact if it happens? Two techniques make it practical. First, compare down to the baseline (what people do today without the feature), not up to an ideal: the goal is "better than what they have now". Second, mark nice-to-haves with a tilde (~). They stay on the list, get built only if time is left at the end, and usually never do. Marking them is already the hammering. Scope hammering is the in-flight answer to [[Scope creep]]. Where the [[Iron Triangle]] says something must give when scope grows, scope hammering decides in advance that it's the scope, never the deadline. ## References - https://basecamp.com/shapeup/3.5-chapter-14 ## Related - [[Shape Up]] - [[Appetite (Shape Up)]] - [[Scope creep]] - [[Iron Triangle]] - [[Minimum Viable Product (MVP)]] - [[MoSCoW Method]] - [[Kano model]] - [[You Aren't Gonna Need It (YAGNI)]] - [[You can always trade time for features, but you can never trade features for time]] - [[Project Management (MoC)]]