Twelve jobs product teams actually do, scored on two axes. One tells you where AI works. The other tells you what it costs you to hand it over. They are not the same question, and the gap between them is where teams lose their judgment without noticing.
Check the jobs you personally do, not your team, you. Then put rough hours per month next to each. Rough is fine. Wrong is fine. Directionally right is all this needs.
Gut-score each job you checked, 1–5 on each axis. Don't agonize. If you're stuck between two numbers, take the lower one.
Input · Verifiability · Context · Volume
Judgment debt · Reversibility · Accountability · Presence
| The job | Step 01 | Step 02 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| I do this | Hrs / mo | CAN 1–5 | SHOULD 1–5 | Pain 1–5 | |
If a job scores 3 and 3, it's scoped too broadly. Split it. "Prioritization" is fuzzy. "Assembling the inputs for prioritization" and "making the call" score completely differently.
Your pick is the highest hours × pain in the Automate quadrant. Not the most interesting job. The biggest one you lose nothing by handing over.
The second blank is the one people skip. It's the one that turns a worksheet into a change.
You picked one job out of the Automate quadrant and you can go build that on your own. The instruction is build the workflow, and it's enough to act on. Now look at the other one.
AI is already good enough to do these, and the work is your judgment. The only instruction on this whole worksheet for all of them is one sentence: keep the draft, keep the decision.
That sentence is right. It's also useless. It doesn't tell you what the checkpoint looks like on prioritization, what AI-assisted-but-not-AI-decided strategy looks like on a Tuesday afternoon, or what to do when your PM scores a job a 4 and you score it a 1.