How to Read This Package
Kibble & Co. is a fictional merchant. This package demonstrates a scoping method: ten documents that take one commerce capability — subscriptions — from business context to an estimable work breakdown, written as if a single mid-size pet-supply retailer commissioned the build on the BigCommerce platform. The method is the exhibit; the merchant is the fixture. No procurement exists or is implied, and every figure is invented for the fictional scope and labeled that way where it appears.
Reading order. 01 (context and the ask) → 02 (capability catalog and the MVP-vs-deferred boundary) → 03 (merchant, shopper, and system journeys) → 04 (the quality bar) → 05 (the platform integration contract — the biggest estimation drivers) → 06 (non-functional targets) → 07 (the work breakdown, excerpted by design) → 08 (scope boundary and engagement model) → 09 (the required bid format) → 10 (the public reference prototype).
What each document answers, for an estimator
| Document | Answers |
|---|---|
| 01 — Context & scope | What is being commissioned, for whom, and why build on the platform |
| 02 — Capability catalog | What the capability consists of; the phase boundary |
| 03 — User journeys | What the merchant, shopper, and system experiences actually are |
| 04 — Competitive benchmark | Table stakes vs. where this build must exceed them |
| 05 — Platform integration contract | What the build integrates with; the estimation drivers |
| 06 — Non-functional requirements | Cross-cutting targets and the evidence bar for each |
| 07 — Work breakdown | The estimable skeleton — shape and samples, not a full corpus |
| 08 — Scope boundary & engagement model | In/out of scope, decided policies, change control |
| 09 — Estimation scaffold | The required bid format; how a bid is evaluated |
| 10 — Reference prototype | A working public demo fleet as the behavior oracle |
Why publish a fictional bid package
Most scoping work never gets shown: the artifacts are either confidential or too entangled with a real engagement to share. Fictionalizing the commissioner makes the method itself publishable — the document anatomy, the projection discipline (one canonical work breakdown, every other view derived from it), and the estimation scaffold that forces bids into a comparable shape. Read it as a template for how to hand a build to an estimator with no discovery phase.
Each page's markdown source is downloadable from the sidebar.
Kibble & Co. is a fictional demo merchant. This package is an independent demonstration by Nino Chavez of a scoping method — not a BigCommerce product, and not a real procurement.