It takes work and design insight to get to a simple idea that fits in a small time box. The question is, if we only care enough to spend two weeks on this now, how does this specific solution look?Īnybody can suggest expensive and complicated solutions. Stating the appetite in the pitch prevents unproductive conversations.
Not only do we want to solve this use case, we want to come up with a way to do it in six weeks, not three months, or-in the case of a small batch project-two weeks, not the whole six weeks. You can think of the appetite as another part of the problem definition. People will be able to weigh the solution against this specific problem-or other solutions if a debate ensues-and judge whether or not that story has a better outcome with the new solution swapped in. This gives you a baseline to test fitness against. The best problem definition consists of a single specific story that shows why the status quo doesn’t work. How far you have to go to spell out the problem will depend on how much context you share with the people reading the write-up. We want to be able to separate out that discussion about the demand so we don’t spend time on a good solution that doesn’t benefit the right people. The solution might be perfect, but what if the problem only happens to customers who are known to be a poor fit to the product? We could spend six weeks on an ingenious solution that only benefits a small percentage of customers known to have low retention. “Add tabs to the iPad app” might be attractive to UI designers, but what’s to prevent the discussion from devolving into a long debate about different UI approaches? Without a specific problem, there’s no test of fitness to judge whether one solution is better than the other.Įstablishing the problem also lets us have a clearer conversation later when it’s time to pitch the idea or bet on it. You don’t establish any basis for discussing whether this solution is good or bad without a problem. It sounds like an obvious point but it’s surprising how often teams, our own included, jump to a solution with the assumption that it’s obvious why it’s a good idea to build this thing.ĭiving straight into “what to build”-the solution-is dangerous. It’s critical to always present both a problem and a solution together.
Problem - The raw idea, a use case, or something we’ve seen that motivates us to work on this.There are five ingredients that we always want to include in a pitch:
The ingredients are all the things that we need to both capture the work done so far and present it in a form that will enable the people who schedule projects to make an informed bet. The purpose of the pitch is to present a good potential bet. This is where we say “Okay, this is ready to write up as a pitch.” In this chapter, we’ll walk through the ingredients of a pitch and show some fully worked out examples from real projects at Basecamp. Now we need to put the concept into a form that other people will be able to understand, digest, and respond to. But the concept is still in our heads or in some hard-to-decipher drawings on the whiteboard or our notebook. We’ve got the elements of a solution now, and we’ve de-risked our concept to the point that we’re confident it’s a good option to give a team.
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