From Idea to Implementation-Ready: A Six-Phase Pipeline with Rewelo

Most projects start with a vague idea and a Jira board. The gap between "we should build X" and "here is a fully specified, dependency-ordered, priority-scored backlog ready for sprint planning" is usually traversed through a series of meetings, half-written requirements documents, and optimistic estimates scribbled on sticky notes. This post documents a different approach: a six-phase pipeline in which each phase produces structured, machine-readable artifacts that feed directly into the next. The backbone is Rewelo — a CLI and MCP server for relative-weight backlog prioritization built on DuckDB — which transforms the back half of the process from intuition-based ticket-sorting into a transparent, reproducible calculation. The question is not "how do we decide what to build first?" but "how do we make the decision auditable, reversible, and legible to every stakeholder?" The result, across a real product build: 113 scored and tagged tickets, 124 dependency relations organized into fi