Hi Robson,
When we were doing consulting as 37signals back in 2003, Jason Fried had a funny way of explaining this to clients.
They’d ask “how much does it cost to do X”?
He would answer “well, what’s your budget?” Because of course you can execute the same thing to different levels.
They would say “we don’t know.”
Then he would say “Ok, so a million dollars?”
“No no, more like 50k.”
Boom.
I think this approach works great for defining appetite in general. So instead of trying to talk about the concept, ask: “If it takes 12 months to ship this, how will you feel?” Then work backward until you reach a point where, regardless of the actual implementation cost, management feels like “yeah I’d feel that was a win.” That’s the appetite.
I had a case like this on a side project recently. We just didn’t know how long it would take to implement an algorithm — most of the work we’d done so far was simple data collection and storage. In the end, we gave it a wide berth, maybe 2x what it’ll actually take, because we admitted that even if it took that long, it’s so valuable that we’d consider the time well spent. This gave everyone more room to breathe while still knowing we wouldn’t spend too much time on it.