September 15, 2026
Draft copy · pending review
Phase 0 is a spec. It names the user, the job, the packages the company will reuse, and the conditions that end the work.
Writing the kill criteria first sounds pessimistic. It is the opposite. It is what lets us move fast on the ideas that survive, because we already agreed on what failure looks like.
A studio that cannot name those conditions will build too many of the wrong things, and fall in love with all of them.
Partners trust a studio that will stop. So do engineers. So do we.