Delivery
Ship a first slice, not “phase one”
Phase one is where products go to wait. A first production slice is how you learn whether the work was worth doing.
Helen Ward · 12 August 2026 · 6 min
Most software programmes still plan in phases. Phase one is the architecture. Phase two is the build. Phase three is “user adoption.” By the time anyone uses the product, the team has spent a year proving they can follow a plan.
A first slice is different. It is a thin path through the real system: one user, one job, one environment that looks like production. It is allowed to be narrow. It is not allowed to be fake.
What a slice must include
Identity, or a honest stand-in. Persistence. An interface an actual operator can click. Observability so you can see it fail. If any of those are missing, you have a demo.
The point is not speed for its own sake. The point is to put the risk in front of you early: the partner API that lies, the workflow nobody described, the data that is not where the spreadsheet said it was.
How we run it
At Zaasme, discovery ends with a slice proposal: who it is for, what “done” looks like, and what we are deliberately leaving out. The first sprint is not a setup sprint. Setup is part of the slice.
If you are mid-programme and still waiting for a foundation to complete, stop and cut a slice through what you already have. You will learn more in two weeks than in another month of alignment.