The Saturday scope-creep kill list

Short Saturday post. Ten minutes, four questions, one outcome: a bid-board that reflects what your team can actually win next week.

The problem this drill solves is one we have written about repeatedly — proposal functions say yes to too many bids and spend their best engineers on pursuits the team cannot win. Quilt’s writeup names this as the single biggest hidden cost in most RFP processes, and the fix is not a better proposal tool — it is a cheaper discipline that says no earlier.

Open the bid board. Every active pursuit that is not yet in draft is a candidate for the kill list. For each one, answer:

One: has the capture plan been updated in the last 14 days? If the answer is no, the pursuit is drifting. A capture plan that is not being fed with new intelligence is not a live pursuit — it is a placeholder nobody has had the nerve to retire. Put it on the kill list.

Two: can you name the specific differentiator, in one sentence, without checking the plan? If you need to look it up, the differentiator is not clear enough to thread through a response. A bid without a live differentiator becomes a generic response that gets filtered at the swap-name test. Put it on the kill list.

Three: is a named SME committed to the response, with time on their calendar? Not an email asking. A commitment. If the SME is not blocked out, the draft will stall in week two, every week. Put it on the kill list.

Four: if you lose this bid, does the team learn something that helps the next bid? Some losses are valuable because the pursuit is adjacent to a segment you want to learn. Most losses are not. If the answer is no, the pursuit is not paying its B&P cost. Put it on the kill list.

The kill list is not a list of bids you will definitely drop. It is a list of bids that need a decision before Monday standup. A senior commercial owner — the VP of Sales, the founder, the CFO — has to sign off on each retirement. The kill list forces the conversation. Most weeks, two of the five pursuits on the list get retired. One week a quarter, all five do.

Two notes on using this drill well.

First: the drill is a filter, not an oracle. A pursuit that flunks all four questions is almost certainly a no-bid; a pursuit that passes all four is almost certainly a go. But pursuits in the middle — one or two questions that flunk, two or three that pass — are the ones where the conversation at Monday standup actually matters. The kill list surfaces the middle cases explicitly, which is the whole point.

Second: run the drill with the commercial owner, not the proposal manager alone. A proposal manager can flag that a capture plan is stale, but the decision to retire a pursuit is a commercial decision that belongs to the person who owns the revenue line. If the drill is just the proposal manager’s to-do list, the kill list becomes a recommendation nobody acts on and Monday’s bid board looks exactly like last Monday’s.

Ten minutes on Saturday. Cleaner bid board on Monday. Fewer responses written with half attention next week. The pursuits that survive the drill get the SME time, the capture budget, and the drafting attention they actually deserve — because the three pursuits that didn’t survive are no longer competing for that same attention.