Consider · Chapter 2
Design it
Turn a rough idea into a plausible investment without pretending you already know the solution.
Understand
Design begins with one question.
How much is this Opportunity worth to us?
The answer is the Appetite.
Appetite constrains the solution. The imagined solution does not dictate the investment.
A useful Appetite is exhaustible. When it is consumed, the operation must reconsider rather than silently expand.
Do this on your project
Continue Groom. Work through the questions that require judgment.
By the end, the Bet candidate should make these things legible.
- Opportunity — what possibility are we considering?
- Outcome — what meaningful change in reality do we intend to cause?
- Baseline — what is true before the change?
- Appetite — how much attention, elapsed time, execution, compute, money, review burden, operational risk, or disruption is this worth?
- Approach — what plausible path fits inside the investment?
- Boundaries — what are we deliberately not solving?
- Evidence — what would justify the claims we expect to make?
- Displacement — what receives less investment because we choose this?
- Risk and Authority — what consequences matter, and who may authorize them?
Do not fill fields merely because they exist. The point is the investment decision.
This part is yours
Your agent can orient, research, synthesize, challenge, propose, and model tradeoffs.
It cannot own consequential judgment merely because it can produce an answer.
Capability does not imply Authority.
You decide what the Opportunity is worth.
Look for
A well-designed Bet is bounded enough to operate and open enough to discover implementation.
Avoid both "Improve retention" and a giant implementation specification produced before discovery.
What you just learned
Fix the investment before you pick the solution.
Design creates a plausible bounded investment decision; it does not predict the future.