Built because we got tired of the noise.
Every project management tool promises to be the last one you will ever need, and they all arrive the same way: infinitely configurable, and therefore shipped half-built. cadence. started as a frustration and became a conviction. Structure beats flexibility, and arriving with an opinion beats arriving with options.
Project management drifted into administration.
The tools meant to help teams ship faster became the thing that needed managing. Setup projects before the actual project. Custom fields nobody agrees on. Dashboards that need a walkthrough before they mean anything.
Phase-gate has been running aerospace programmes and Fortune 500 product portfolios for decades, and it works for a boring reason: work moves through ordered stages, and each stage has criteria someone has to sign. Quality is a precondition rather than a review.
It just never had software worth using. That is the gap.
Three principles
Every product decision runs the same filter. Does it make a team faster, does it protect quality, and does it then get out of the way? If not, it does not ship.
- Opinionated by design
- There are no custom fields. The vocabulary is projects, phases, tasks and gate criteria, and that is all of it. A tool that can model anything makes every team invent its own dialect, and then nothing is comparable across two of them.
- Structure is the product
- A phase does not close while a criterion is open. That is a constraint rather than a convenience, and it is the reason the record left behind is worth reading a year later.
- Speed is a feature
- Fast to set up, fast to move around, fast to get a signal out of. Every screen is judged on how quickly it tells you something you did not already know.
We would rather be wrong in a specific way than configurable in a general one.
cadence. exists because every tool we tried could be configured into roughly the right shape, and none of them arrived as it. Making that shape the default is the whole product, and it is also the risk: a team whose process genuinely is not phase-gate should use something else, and we would rather say so here than sell them a settings page.
Ready to build with an opinion?
Free plan, no card, no setup call. Pick a template and open the first gate.