Scope creep for small teams

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Most advice about scope creep assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What to keep

Small additions compound into missed deadlines. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

The practical version

Say yes to the change and honest about the cost. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

How to tell if yours is fine

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Three things worth confirming about scope creep before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A written change process protects both sides — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.