Planning agent · Forces review before code

A planning agent that kills weak ideas before your team builds them.

Every new product idea runs through three forcing-question gates — CEO, Engineering, Design — before a single task is written. Ideas that can't survive the gates die cheap. Ideas that pass ship with explicit kill criteria baked in.

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Human review gates before any code

~40%

Ideas killed at the first gate

3 wks

From brief to ready-to-build

The Challenge

Most product ideas don't fail in execution. They fail at the step nobody forced a halt on.

A team hears an idea, feels the excitement, writes a brief, and starts building. Three months in, someone finally asks the question that should have been asked on day one: is the demand actually there?

By then, it's sunk-cost territory. Engineers have picked a stack. Designers have shipped screens. Nobody wants to be the one who says "let's kill this" — so the project drags on, eating runway, until it quietly gets deprioritized without a decision ever being made.

The root cause isn't the team. It's that there's no forced pause between "exciting idea" and "shipping code" — no structured moment where a CEO must interrogate the demand, an engineer must challenge the architecture, and a designer must reject the generic SaaS template. When those conversations don't happen before code, they happen three months later, in a retrospective nobody enjoys.

Planner exists to make those three conversations unavoidable — and to make kill criteria part of the plan, not a last-minute judgment call.

How the agent handles it

Three forcing gates. Ten ordered steps. One handoff score.

Three human gates sit in front of code.

CEO, Engineering, and Design each halt the pipeline. At each gate the agent runs forcing questions tuned to that role — "What's the wedge?", "What breaks at 10× scale?", "What would make this feel like a template?" — and nothing moves forward until a human signs off.

Step order is enforced, not suggested.

You physically cannot write tasks before requirements, and you cannot write requirements before all three gates pass. A tracker blocks out-of-order completion. This removes the temptation to skip ahead when the team "just wants to start building".

Kill criteria are part of the plan, not an afterthought.

Every idea that passes the CEO gate must have an explicit "we shut this down if…" statement written down, with metrics and a review date. No more zombie projects that nobody wants to be the one to cancel.

Handoff is scored before anything ships to engineering.

The final step runs a 16-point completeness check on the plan. Below 16/24, it goes back to the gates. At 16+, engineering gets a brief with requirements, Phase 1 tasks, a test plan, and the kill criteria — ready to build, not ready to argue about.

What you get

Three things change on day one.

3weeks

Brief to build-ready

From a rough idea to a scored plan engineering can execute — end to end in about three weeks, including the three gate reviews.

~40%

Ideas killed at the CEO gate

Weak demand stories die before engineers touch code. Those engineering weeks go into ideas that survived the interrogation.

100%

Plans ship with explicit kill criteria

Every plan that reaches engineering has a written "we kill this if X by Y" line. Sunk-cost decisions get made on metrics, not mood.

Numbers observed in Brilworks' internal reference deployment. Actual figures on your stack will depend on team size, review cadence, and volume of incoming ideas.

Is this right for you?

Honest fit criteria. We'd rather say no than oversell.

✓Strong fit if

You ship multiple new product bets per quarter and need to kill the weak ones early
You have CEO, engineering, and design input available — this agent surfaces those voices, it doesn't replace them
You've watched a project drag for 3+ months because nobody wanted to be the one to kill it
You're willing to enforce step order (no skipping to tasks before the gates clear)

✗Not a fit if

Your CEO makes all product decisions unilaterally — the three-gate model won't work
You ship one or two ideas a year (the machinery is overkill)
You want a tool that generates ideas, not one that stress-tests them
You need same-day turnarounds on planning — this is for multi-week validation, not sprints

Book a 30-minute scoping call.

We'll walk through your current planning flow, map it against the three-gate pattern, and tell you honestly whether it fits — and what it would take to ship.

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