The Art of Scoping

The thought process of scoping a product

When working on a project/ product, we always talk about scope. But how do you scope, is less being discussed or only measured by intuitions.

Scoping is especially important if you are running a startup with limited resources in terms of money, talent, and time. People talk about “focus” on execution and. However, in every iteration and sprint, scoping makes each startup unique and delivers differently.

So the question comes to how we can scope better.

There are no best practices for scoping, so we need to ensure the development of our work makes sense. So, how can we scope?

From my learning, is that first, you need to have a perspective of what the world will look like in the next 1 or 2 years cause once you start breaking down into phases, which also called scoping, you need to see ahead what the market is going to be like while you are building it. What are the current trends that will change the dynamic of the ecosystem? What is the next most important thing in the sector we are building? What does the mid-term and long-term vision look like?

These are difficult questions to answer because you are trying to make a future market perspective. However, it’s very important when you are building a product. Time passes when you are trying to build and iterate your product; you want a strategy that you are still positioned to win, even if everything takes much longer than expected.

Once you have all these assumptions, you can discuss with others whether there’s a loophole in your thought process. Finally, we will get to scoping, which means scoping the next few weeks, months of business, development timeline, and progress.

I think this is the best scoping progress; we need to answer hard questions first and get into details later.