· 1 min read
One page, or it doesn't start
An internal project or tool that cannot be described on one page is not ready to be built.
Most stalled projects are not short on ideas. They are short on a sentence that says what is about to happen, and a list that says what is not.
Whenever I kick off a new internal tool or workflow automation, I start with a one-pager. It has four parts:
- The outcome, written so a teammate can immediately tell whether it happened.
- What is in scope for this pass.
- What is explicitly out of scope.
- How we will verify it worked, in something observable.
If we cannot fill that page, we are not ready to write code. More sync meetings will not produce the missing clarity. They will just produce notes about the missing clarity.
The page is also the artifact you forward across teams. A stakeholder or team lead who will not read four concise paragraphs will not read a sprawling wiki page, and they certainly will not absorb a 30-minute slide presentation. The constraint is the point. An operational decision that does not survive a single page will not survive production use.
Scope that lives only in a meeting gets renegotiated by whoever remembers the call differently. Scope that lives on a page gets edited. Editing is cheaper than refactoring.