How many Pitches typically enter a Betting meeting at your company? How much time do you allow per Pitch? Have searched this forum but could not find material on this question.
I’d say it depends a bit on the size of the engineering team. The more resources you have, the more pitches you can take. We’re a start-up with 2 dev teams (2-3devs per team) and we usually have around 6-8 pitches from which we can choose. With the resources that we have, we have thus room for 2L appetite pitches or 1L and 2S appetite pitches that make it into the cycle.
6-8 works for us, as we want to have just enough options to choose from depending on the context we’re in at that stage (things can change rapidly at a start-up 
). We accept we cannot do everything and cannot plan months ahead. The 6 weeks cadence is therefore just long enough to get something meaningful out of the door and short enough to re-assure us that we can work on other stuff we want to do relatively fast.
Thank you! Follow up: how many people work on those 6-8 Pitches, are they the same people, and how much time would you say you spend on one Pitch (ballpark range)?
Most of the pitches are written by me (the PM), CTO, and the head of engineering. Our product is a combination of an app and an API so 3rd parties can integrate with us. Given that an important part of our product is the API, we need some purely technical pitches as well (eg: support webhook integrations) which are initiated by the tech guys.
All pitches are joint efforts though. There’s obviously a “pitch owner” but the pitch document is shared with the whole company so everybody can read it and give comments. Time spent on pitch writing is heavily dependent on the complexity of the feature or pitch. I’d say the initial write-up is maybe half a day, a day max and then the team gives feedback and we iterate on it until it’s 1) de-risked enough so we feel safe to bet on it and 2) we’re comfortable with the solution for the need or problem we try to solve.
Low complexity, small appetite pitches can be finalized in less than a day. High complexity, large appetite pitches can take multiple iterations leading up to the betting table.
PS: we don’t write 6-8 pitches per cycle, there are pitches from previous cycles that can get carried over. I’d say on average we write 2-3 new pitches per cycle.
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Thanks again! Hope you don’t mind another follow-up (to you, and others):
how does the meeting go in practice?
What agenda points do you go through to pick the #1 priority Pitch?
Do you use a framework to “score” pitches, e.g. something like RICE?