Now Next Later
A live Now/Next/Later roadmap with conviction scores
Now Next Later is a sample brief. We imagined a product team whose strategy offsite produced a good plan that was a forgotten slide deck by the next Monday. The team is imaginary. The roadmap tool isn't: we designed and engineered it, and you and a colleague can move bets at the same time in the live build below.
A sample brief, a real product. We wrote this brief ourselves. The business is imaginary; the product is not: we designed and engineered it, and you can use it above. We publish results only for work a client has let us verify, so this page shows none.
The brief
We imagined a product team at a growing software company. Strategy happens twice a year at an offsite; by Monday it's a slide deck, and a month later nobody can say which bets are still on. We built the tool we'd want to leave behind after that workshop.
The problem
Roadmaps go stale because updating them is a chore and nobody trusts the old version. A plan needs an owner, an effort and a confidence on every bet, and it has to stay current while several people edit it at once.
- Every bet with an owner, effort and confidence
- A portfolio score that moves with the plan
- Several editors, no conflicts
- History you can compare quarter to quarter
The approach
Bets are cards on a Now, Next and Later board, and a conviction score recomputes as you move them. Sync is Yjs CRDTs over WebSockets, so there's no save button and no merge conflicts, even on flaky workshop Wi-Fi. Snapshots keep each quarter's plan so you can diff it.
What would change for a team like this: the plan stays the latest plan, and the roadmap review starts from the board instead of rebuilding it.
- Yjs CRDT multiplayer, offline-tolerant
- Conviction score from confidence and horizon
- Quarterly snapshots with a diff view
- Objectives, feedback and releases linked to bets
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 or Notion databases. Good tools, but conviction maths 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.