Product 101: Now, Next, Later
Choosing What to Build, and What to Cut, with RICE and MoSCoW.
Content
Every team has more good ideas than time. A product team with a working app has twenty things worth doing and room for three. When nobody makes the choice, the deadline makes it, and it usually drops the boring thing nobody argued for. The real question isn’t whether to cut. It’s whether the cut is a decision you can explain.
In this meeting, we’ll cover two tools that turn cutting into a decision:
- RICE compares options against each other. We’ll score ideas on Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort, and see why a cheap, shaky idea can beat a well-supported one, and what to do about it.
- MoSCoW sorts work into Must, Should, Could, and Won’t this time. We’ll learn how to test whether something is truly a Must, why Musts shouldn’t fill more than about 60% of your effort, and why the Won’t list matters most.
We’ll also look at a real case: when Basecamp’s customers asked for a calendar, the team knew a full one could take six months and reach only about a tenth of users. They shipped something far smaller in six weeks, and they wrote down what they were leaving out before they started building.
You’ll walk away with:
- A way to score and compare competing ideas
- A test for what’s a Must versus a nice-to-have
- A habit of writing down what you’re not building
- A sense of when to trust the formula, and when to go against it
No prior experience needed. Come ready to argue about what makes the cut!