Now Next Later
A living roadmap for product bets
Strategy that survives contact with Monday: a Now/Next/Later board where every bet carries effort, confidence and an owner — multiplayer over CRDTs, so the plan is always the latest plan.
- Year2026
- Runs onWeb
- DisciplineProduct Strategy
A sample brief, a real product. We wrote this brief ourselves to show how we work; the client and their story are illustrative. The product is not: it was designed and engineered here, and you can use it below. We publish results only for work a client has let us verify, so this page shows none.
The brief
We ran the strategy engagement, then built the tool so it wouldn’t die in a slide deck. Now Next Later turns bets into cards with confidence and effort, computes portfolio conviction, and keeps the whole thing live for everyone at once.
The approach
Realtime sync is Yjs CRDTs over WebSockets — no save button, no merge conflicts, works through flaky Wi-Fi in a workshop room. A small Node service snapshots history to PostgreSQL so every quarter’s plan is diffable.
- Yjs CRDT multiplayer, offline-tolerant
- Conviction score from confidence × horizon
- Quarterly snapshots, diffable history
- Exports to the board deck automatically
What shipped
- Drag-and-drop board
- Conviction score with a live editor
- Effort by confidence matrix
- Snapshots with diff
- Markdown export
- Teammate edits merged without conflict
- Quarterly roadmap
- Objectives and key results
- Feedback inbox linked to bets
- Specs, releases and changelog
Under the surface
How it is built
Multiplayer over Yjs CRDTs on WebSockets means no save button and no merge conflicts; a Node service snapshots board state into PostgreSQL so every quarter’s plan is diffable history.
- CRDT sync: offline edits merge cleanly
- Conviction score recomputed on every change
- Immutable quarterly snapshots, diff view
- Board-deck export generated server-side
Considered and turned down
Linear/Notion databases — good tools, but conviction math and workshop multiplayer needed their own surface.
Stack
The mechanism, working
The part of Now Next Later that was hardest to get right, as a small model you can operate.
CRDT multiplayer
Edits merge without a server deciding who wins. Offline changes fold in cleanly when you’re back.
Conviction scoring
A portfolio number from confidence × horizon × effort, recomputed on every change so the plan ranks itself.
