How Ship It was designed

Ship It is about prioritization under stakeholder pressure. Most cards are genuine tradeoffs: a choice can support customers while delaying revenue, or protect delivery while frustrating an executive. After each call, the game shows the meter change, its causal reasoning, and the assumption behind the model.

Some calls are not ordinary trades. Consent, accessibility, security, truthful marketing, privacy and legal compliance are explicit integrity boundaries. A balanced portfolio cannot erase a breach or an unresolved review requirement.

Four meters start at 50: Customer, Business, Team, and Tech. Customer represents sustainable customer value, adoption and trust, rather than raw growth alone. Any meter at zero ends the run because the product is shelved, the funding pulled, the engineers gone, or the platform down.

Maxing a meter is its own failure mode. Park any meter at 85+ and its backlash card comes for you: a viral spike drowns support, a monetization squeeze angers users, comfort culture invites board pressure, and a gold-plated platform starves the roadmap. Optimizing one stakeholder always taxes another.

Choices set flags that the deck remembers. Skip the postmortem in week two and the same outage returns in week eight, twice as hard. Four authored arcs cover an incident, a demanding enterprise customer, a burnout spiral, and a launch gamble. Each can be resolved or fumbled, and your review remembers which.

Every run ends in a quarterly review. The review separates operating balance from integrity and uses both before awarding a leadership rating. It also considers your lowest meter, the arcs you closed or abandoned, and the overshoots you triggered. It is seeded, so the same run always writes the same review. No AI, no server: the whole game is deterministic from its seed.

The retention layer is deliberate: instant restart, a rating ladder to climb, a daily run with streaks and shields, and a share card. The lines are equally deliberate: no dark patterns, no pay-anything, no notifications, and every byte of state lives in your browser. The game about resisting growth hacks should probably resist them itself.