stakeholder approved the spec — now wants to reopen everything in week 6

the challenge

you ran a two-week discovery process. you wrote the PRD. you got explicit sign-off from the head of sales and the head of customer success at the kickoff review. engineering is halfway through building. this morning, the head of sales forwarded a customer email and wrote: "after reading this, i think we need to rethink whether we're solving the right problem. can we get on a call to walk through the spec again?" the engineering lead is scheduled to cut a release candidate in nine days.

the customer in the email is a $180k ARR account, one of your five largest. what the head of sales is gesturing at would require rewriting two of the four core user flows. you have a roadmap commitment to your CEO that this ships in Q2.