Last CM-owned session. It collects the 20% at 3:25 and then serves the four weeks after it: W09 UAT, W10 business model, W11 the report, W12 the showcase. Dec 14 is the last day of term and nothing slips past it.
The real product of this afternoon is not the build block. It is eighteen honest cut lists.
A gate is a condition, not a criterion. Missing one comes back unmarked, not marked down.
Check them in the room as work comes in. A student with a dead prototype link finds out at 3:30 with the laptop open, instead of in a grade comment a fortnight later. Each of these is a thirty-second fix here and a real problem anywhere else.
This is the tightest fifteen minutes in the term: eighteen students, four checks. Have the mechanism decided before you walk in.
You each wrote three to five rules. The honest answer is never none.
The standup has a specific job. Hearing seventeen other people admit the same thing stops the rest of the afternoon being defensive. Today is about cutting, and nobody cuts well while defending.
If someone says “none”, ask which rule is so loose it cannot be broken. That is the more interesting failure.
Design methodologies, second pass. Twenty minutes including the demo, which is most of it.
Your W03 journey map was drawn before customer discovery, before the proposal, before a prototype existed, and before your venture had a visual position.
It was a hypothesis, drawn honestly, from a canvas. Five weeks of evidence have happened since.
Name the five weeks specifically: W04 discovery, W05 proposal, W06 prototype, W07 art direction. Vagueness makes this sound like busywork. Specificity makes the point obvious.
Say plainly that the first map is not being marked and was not wasted. Students suspect design methods of being ritual, and they are often right. This session settles the question either way.
Same venture that volunteered in W07, asked again. Two things on screen: their W03 map as drawn on 28 September, and their prototype as it stands today. Walk the map stage by stage and mark it live.
Do not rush to the third category. Let it arrive. It lands hard, because the student usually built something there.
The full line: “Your first map was a hypothesis and you drew it honestly. This one is a finding. Nothing in the gap between them is wasted work. The gap is the work. And everything on the far side of a step nobody reaches is something you get to stop building today.”
Say the last part plainly. Students hear “cut” as failure. On a four-week runway it is the highest-value decision available to them, and the framing has to make that true rather than consoling.
The states you would otherwise skip (empty, loading, error, first-run), generated fast and consistently against your system. The unglamorous 40% of a prototype that decides whether it survives a demo.
Ask it what to build next and it returns a plausible product, not a shippable one. It optimises for what a complete thing looks like. It will never tell you to cut anything.
You know the date. You know what next week’s UAT is about to test, and which steps real people reached. It knows none of that, and it cannot see your calendar.
“It will never tell you to cut anything” is the line that matters here. Every model in the room is trained to be helpful, and helpful reads as additive. On a four-week runway that is a liability.
The template has a why column that cannot be left blank. Say that out loud. The first instinct is to list features and fill in the reasons later, and later does not happen.
Both produce a short list. Only one is defensible in December, and only one tells you the right thing to cut.
The rubric can tell these apart, and so can a panel in December. It is also better decision-making: cutting by evidence removes the right things, cutting by time removes whatever is nearest the end of the list.
Cutting is not the same as failing to finish. The difference is whether it was written down before it happened.
Say it now so the cut list has a destination. It is the one part of today that every person in the room presents in four weeks, and knowing that changes how carefully they write it this afternoon.
⚠️ Confirm with Ryan before the session that this is agreed. It is currently a request, not a settled requirement. If he has declined it, cut this slide. The cut list stands on its own. Do not promise a showcase slot that does not exist.
A rule you have broken four times without noticing was never a rule. That belongs in the process book.
The rules were handed in an hour ago, which makes this concrete rather than theoretical. The interesting moment is not writing the rule. It is the first time obeying it costs something.
The process book is briefed next week. Flag it, do not teach it here. W09 is already full.
Hand out the cut-list template on the way out.
Circulate on “never reached”. It is under-used, because marking it means admitting you built something nobody got to. Ask: how do you know anyone reached this? Usually the honest answer is that nobody has tested it yet, which is itself a finding and goes into next week’s UAT.
Students who did no testing in W06 will find this harder. Their evidence is thinner but not zero. The prototype itself is evidence about what was hard to build.
The longest uninterrupted build block in the term. Protect it. No announcements.
Both instructors circulate. The most useful question is “is this on your cut list?” A student building something they cut twenty minutes ago has not really cut it, and finding that out now is worth more than any critique of the work.
Keep the one-line round fast: eighteen people, ten minutes. The hardest cut is the right prompt because it surfaces the cuts made from evidence rather than convenience.
“You each leave today with a dated cut list. Next week’s standup is that list checked against reality, and in four weeks a panel will ask you what you decided not to build. Same answer all three times. That is the point. If it changes, that is fine, but the change gets written down too.”
6:10, not 6:14. W09 is jointly owned and already carries four topics. Do not add to it from here. What W08 owes it is one artifact in one form, and this sentence is that handoff.
Confirm every submission is in before they leave, and that anyone whose gate failed has fixed it. A submission that goes home unfixed tonight is a marking problem for two people in seven days.
These slides are a fixed 16:9 canvas. In portrait they shrink to an unreadable strip; landscape gives you the whole slide.