CTO Toolkit
Execution Contract
The agreement between the accountable human and whoever implements — reviewed once, at the level of strategy.
How to use this
Complete before implementation begins on anything non-trivial. Approve the contract rather than approving each individual action. If you cannot fill in Intent, Risk and Tests, you are aiming at nothing — and you will hit it. If you cannot fill them in, the work is not ready to start.
The contract
- Intent — the outcome being pursued, stated without prescribing a solution
- Scope — what is included, and explicitly what is not
- Constraints — architecture, security, data, performance, compatibility
- Risk — what could go wrong and what is hard to reverse
- Tests — how correctness will be demonstrated
- Acceptance criteria — testable conditions for done
- Execution plan — sequence, affected components, approval points
Autonomy declaration
- Which autonomy level applies to this change (A0–A4)
- Which actions require human approval before execution
- Which systems and data the implementer may touch
- What the implementer must never do without escalating
Quality bar
- A reviewer can tell whether the right thing is being built, not only whether it will work
- At least one serious alternative was considered and rejected on record
- Irreversible decisions are flagged explicitly
- Test strategy exists before implementation, not after
When to skip it
- Trivial changes already covered by autonomy level A1
- Time-boxed spikes whose output is knowledge, not production code
- Work fully specified by an existing standard or template
This is an original, generic framework for reuse. It is not proprietary employer material.