Impact
- Helped establish a consistent monthly release cadence
- Reduced mid-cycle changes and scope creep
- Made projects predictable before development started
- Improved alignment between product and engineering
Work often started as ideas, requests, or loosely defined problems coming from different sources, customers, support, or internal teams.
Before committing to build, these ideas needed to be clarified, scoped, and grounded in real user needs.
Problem
- Ideas were vague or incomplete
- Scope expanded during development
- Tradeoffs were unclear or made too late
- Teams had to figure things out while building
- Too much thinking was happening during the build phase, leading to rework and unpredictability.
Constraints
- Multiple stakeholders with competing priorities
- Limited time to shape before committing to work
- Input from customers was often messy or indirect
- Needed to balance speed with enough clarity to move forward
Decisions
I focused on defining problems clearly before proposing solutions.
- Grounded work in real customer pain
- Reduced scope to ship smaller iterations and learn faster
- Separated shaping from building
- Made tradeoffs explicit early
This shifted work from reactive execution to intentional project definition.
Execution
Identified recurring customer pain through support and research. Defined problems, constraints, and tradeoffs before development started. Wrote frames to align teams and guide execution.
Example of a project frame used to define scope and guide execution:
## What problems are we trying to solve? Customers can't renew their domains once they expire. Usually, domains have a restoration period in which they can be recovered; however, as we have no automated support for such a recovery process, customers must contact us asking for help. ## Who are the users, and what do they care about? Customers who missed a domain renewal and want to keep their domain once it's expired and thus not resolving anymore. ## Jobs to Be Done - Customer can restore a domain during redemption period via UI and API - Support team can restore a domain during redemption period ## What will change when we're done and how will we know? ...
Early shaping involved mapping flows, edge cases, and system behavior to clarify constraints:
Outcome
- Fewer mid-cycle changes and surprises
- More predictable delivery across projects
- Better alignment between product and engineering
- Ideas turned into clearly scoped, buildable work
Next steps
- Make frames more concise and easier to scan
- Improve feedback loops after each cycle
- Involve stakeholders earlier when alignment is unclear
Work moved from sporadic releases to a steady, predictable cadence.