Within the world of software, there’s a word you don’t want to hear — but always do. It shows up at kickoff, halfway through, at retros. A word spoken with sighs, grimaces, and the occasional eye-roll.
Scope creep.
Creep
Scope creep is when you end up doing — or wanting to do — more than you planned for. More features, more ideas, more complexity, more. The weight sneaks in, and suddenly delivery feels heavier than the plan ever accounted for.
Most folks treat scope creep like a four-letter word. Untouchable. Dangerous. Something to avoid at all costs. A plan is sacred, after all. Creep is shorthand for failure waiting to happen. It’s the bogeyman folks use to keep people in line: don’t add, don’t explore, don’t touch the edges, stick to the script.
Set scope, stick to it, ship.
And yes — in theory.
But in practice? It never works that way.
You will never plan perfectly. You will always encounter surprises. Every project worth doing comes with unknowns. Success rarely comes from sticking to the blueprint — it comes from adapting when the blueprint burns.
That’s why, when scope creep appears, the first question I ask isn’t “how much effort is this?” or “will this delay us?”
The first question is:
What story do we want to tell?
Does this unexpected, messy, complicated thing serve the story? Does it make the thing better? If yes, then it deserves consideration — even if it wasn’t in scope last month, even if it adds work, even if it scares the PM. Take a day or two to figure out if what’s possible.
Sometimes the unexpected extra isn’t just fluff — it’s the thing that makes the product five levels better. The thing that makes it worth making at all.
Cuts
There’s another kind of creep. The one people don’t fear enough.
Scope cuts.
Scope cuts happen when the calendar trumps everything — quality, story, even sense. For some, it’s the first card they play. Things wobble, and the reflex is blunt: cut something. Doesn’t matter what. Scalpel the scope, save the schedule — at least on paper.
You hit the date. You ship. You celebrate.
But every slice chips away at the story. A button here. A feature there. A layer of polish gone. Small cuts, rational cuts, always defensible cuts. But together they dilute the thing until what’s left is technically “on time” but emotionally flat.
Because what those cuts carved out wasn’t scope—it was the heart. The pulse that made it worth building. You saved the schedule. But you lost the soul.
You launch. It works. It’s fine. But it lands lukewarm. And now you’re not only stuck maintaining it — you’re also carrying the burden of fixing the sentiment you created by shipping something forgettable.
Death by a thousand scope cuts.
Power
Whenever I hear “scope creep,” my brain drifts to another world: games. To a cousin of the term.
Power creep.
Power creep is what happens when a world evolves. A new ability, weapon, or character drops in so strong it bends the rules of the universe around it. Balance tilts. Old strategies crumble. The only way forward is up—raise the ceiling, stack something wilder, stronger, stranger on top. Buffs and nerfs. Rebalances and resets. Whole worlds rewritten in patch notes.
The first time I felt this wasn’t from a design blog or game manual. It was on our family couch, backpack tossed somewhere, YTV channel 25 glowing in front of me. Young suburban Canadian me, locked in, waiting to see what Goku and the crew would face this time.
And then it happened: “Super Saiyan.” The flash of gold. The hair spiking skyward. Two whole episodes of nothing but yelling, charging, the world itself shaking. And then—boom. Everything changed.
Power levels—once carefully counted, whispered like stats on trading cards—instantly became irrelevant. From then on, the only question was: what level of Super Saiyan are you? Each arc had to escalate. Louder. Higher. More absurd. The ceiling shattered, rebuilt, shattered again.
You see the same pattern everywhere in games. StarCraft balance patches that turned entire build orders obsolete overnight. Overwatch updates where your main’s best moves suddenly felt useless. Magic: The Gathering expansions stacking layer upon layer until the original base set felt almost quaint.
Power creep is messy. It’s exhausting. It’s damn near impossible to balance. But it’s also what keeps the world growing — deeper, stranger, more unpredictable.
Alive.
If developers and writes had clung to the “avoid creep at all costs” mindset, none of it would’ve happened. No Super Saiyans. No expansions. No evolution. Just a perfectly balanced, perfectly static world. Which sounds great until you realize it would also be perfectly boring.
Balance
I guess that’s why I don’t fear scope creep.
Yes, it makes delivery harder. Yes, it adds risk. Yes, it muddies the plan.
But it can also be the spark that expands the story. That keeps the world alive. That makes the work worth doing.
So the real question isn’t: How do we prevent creep?
It’s...
Are we creeping toward noise? Or are we creeping toward meaning?
Noise or meaning. Dilution or evolution. Stagnation or spark.
So maybe the challenge isn’t to kill the creep, but to recognize it. Let it in. Let it speak. Because sometimes the thing you fear most is the very thing that makes the story worth telling.
That’s how we told the stories of the Webflow rebrand, AI Site Builder, and Interactions with GSAP. None of them would exist if we hadn’t stopped to listen—if we hadn’t given the Creep a seat at the table.
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P.S. One of the best breakdowns I’ve ever seen of this phenomenon is from Extra Credits. Highly recommend.