Before the workshop. Before the feature list. Before any of it — I write the weight sentence.

“What is this person carrying while they try to use what we are about to build? Not the persona. Not the use case. The specific weight of a specific human at a specific moment. That sentence becomes the acceptance criterion for everything that follows.”

Then I ask the direction question. Not what are we building — what are we pointing toward? A destination is fixed. You reach it or you don’t. A direction is alive. It adjusts. It deepens. Only a direction survives the first sprint under pressure. I name it before the leverage conversation begins, because a 600K vision built on the wrong direction compounds in the wrong place.

Then I ask the leverage question. The brief is the 100K — what we have been asked to build. The vision is the 600K — what this project controls if the direction holds all the way through. My job is to make the 600K visible before the first sprint begins.

Finally — the arc question. Most products are built for Buildings 2 and 3. Acquisition and onboarding. The metrics are there, the sprints are resourced, the floors are lit. Buildings 4 and 5 — the loyal user, the person who leaves and might return, the one who tells someone else — are dark. Strategy means deciding which buildings we are committing to in this sprint and naming honestly which ones we are leaving without an usher.