[ CORECO · FIELD NOTES ]
Five notes from "we need an AI plan" to Core, Reach, Compound — why the floor knows best, and how 30 minutes of collective mapping beats a quarter of analysis.
Someone senior said 'we need an AI plan,' and now it's yours. The instinct is to go make a list from the top. Here's why the list you'd write is the wrong one — and who in the building already knows the right answer.
You gathered the ideas. Now they're fighting for airtime in a meeting, and the ones that win are the ones with the loudest sponsor — not the most saved hours. Here's the failure mode with a name, and why ideas without the time-saved math never survive committee.
The two-by-two of impact versus effort is the correct instinct. It's also the most reliably botched exercise in the workshop world. Here are the three quiet failure modes — no shared units, solo estimates, no clustering — and what a session actually needs to fix them.
Once you know a good AI-prioritization session needs shared units, honest estimates and clustering, the question becomes: what do you run it with? Whiteboard templates, RICE-style scoring, a discovery-workshop consultant — here's where each genuinely fits, and what each honestly costs.
Your AI ideas aren't a ranked list — they're a portfolio, and portfolios have shapes. Here's the three-bet logic behind Core, Reach and Compound, why a focused thirty-minute collective session can beat a quarter of analysis, and how to run a room today.