What would you do if a sponsor asked you to reduce the scope of a release by 30 percent one week before the deadline?

1. Go back to the prioritisation criteria and the business objectives rather than cutting whatever looks easiest to remove.
2. Identify the minimum coherent scope: the smallest set of stories that still delivers a usable end-to-end process. Cutting 30 percent at random can leave a process with a gap in the middle, which is worse than delivering nothing.
3. Check dependencies before proposing cuts. Removing one story can strand several others that assumed it.
4. Present two or three coherent scope options with what each delivers, what it defers, and what the business impact of deferral is — including any manual workaround the business would need in the interim.
5. Confirm the deferred items stay in the backlog with a target release, and communicate the change to every affected stakeholder before go-live rather than letting them discover it themselves.