Six steps. A gate after every one.

Killer questions the Gate Reviewer asks

Is the problem worth solving, and does 1.6 DVQE show Strong or Partial evidence on every dimension? Is this a real customer problem or an internal preference? What are customers doing today instead? What happens if we do nothing for two quarters? Which load-bearing claim is asserted rather than measured? Does the business case survive half the adoption and 1.5× the effort? Could the single success metric be hit while the customer is worse off? Who can veto late and has not been told?

Killer questions the Gate Reviewer asks

Is there evidence of value, and does 2.7 DVQE hold up against the research? Was the customer archetype derived from interviews or a workshop? Is a single anecdote doing the work of a dataset? Is the press release describing a changed customer outcome or a feature list? Which benefit claim has no evidence? Would the competitor's PM say we misunderstood the customer? Is the AI Risk Tier understated?

Killer questions the Gate Reviewer asks

Name the cheaper non-product fix that captures most of the value. Which insight is a restated feature request? Which capability is a screen in disguise? What breaks downstream and what does this make harder next year? What does the customer see on a confident wrong AI answer? Which hard constraint has no owner? What is the riskiest assumption and does the first increment test it?

Killer questions the Gate Reviewer asks

Should we fund and scale, and does the roadmap earn the investment? If engineering never opens this brief, what will they build wrong? Which Feature has no falsifiable benefit hypothesis? Which Story fails INVEST or has acceptance criteria that cannot fail? Which Story has no instrumentation event? Where is the missing 40% of effort (integration, compliance, testing, enablement, instrumentation)? Which dependency owner has not agreed in writing? What falls off the roadmap to make room?

Killer questions the Gate Reviewer asks

Are we achieving intended outcomes, and is every 1.4 KPI instrumented before release? Then a pre-mortem: it is 30 days after launch and this failed; write eight dated failure stories from 5.0–5.5 (support spike with no runbook, accessibility regression found by a customer, rollback trigger that never fired, communications that could not be recalled, model drift, a compliance condition missed, dashboard nobody watched, dependency outage). For each: probability, impact, leading indicator, and whether 5.3–5.5 would catch it.

Killer questions the Gate Reviewer asks

Are we realizing value over time, or pivoting? Write the kill memo: the strongest case for stopping, five lines, from 6.1. Steelman the option 6.4 rejected. Did the metric move while the customer outcome did not? Is Fix really Sunset with extra steps? Is Scale justified by the KPI or by sunk cost? Does the new problem statement actually differ from the original?