The Compound Interest of 'Just One Small Change'
Projects rarely fail because of massive upfront miscalculations; they collapse under the invisible weight of twenty unpriced minor requests.
01.The Innocent Feature Request
Scope Creep never arrives demanding a six-month delay. It enters as a casual Slack message: 'Can we also let users export this as a PDF?' Each small addition appears too trivial to push back against, yet collectively they shred the architectural foundation.
02.Requirements Drift & Delivery Paralysis
As requirements drift, engineering teams spend more time retrofitting existing data models to handle edge cases than building core value. Sprint goals become moving targets, codebases bloat with conditional flags, and testing surfaces explode.
03.Scope Defense Tactics
1. Enforce strict change-control: every added feature requires an explicit trade-off (cutting a feature or moving the date). 2. Lock MVP specifications in written PRDs with clear out-of-scope boundaries. 3. Price every small ask in engineering complexity and operational maintenance.
Saying yes to every small request is saying no to stability, predictability, and on-time delivery. Price the complexity upfront.