Reading path · 3 pieces · About 34 min
Is your roadmap solving the right problem?
Start with a feature list that missed the problem, connect the choice to strategy, then confront the organizational commitment needed to act. The final reading tests whether agreement will change the work.
Who this is for: Product managers and founders facing a roadmap debate where a ranked backlog has not produced agreement. This is a diagnostic reading route, not a scoring-template collection.
Take away: A roadmap choice with a customer rationale, strategic fit and an explicit change in commitment.
Start reading ↓Estimates use 250 words per minute, rounded up for each piece. Allow extra time for the reflection at the end. Open a piece for its selection note and available summary, then continue to the original.
01 / Spot the failure
Ken Norton's Google Docs story shows how a carefully ranked feature list can still misread a customer's basic problem. Start here before reaching for another prioritisation framework.
Pause here: Are people agreeing on a feature name while imagining different customer problems?
02 / Trace the missing connection
Reforge separates mission, company strategy, product strategy, roadmap and goals. Use those distinctions to examine whether a prioritisation dispute starts higher up than the feature list.
Pause here: Where does the reasoning break between company direction and the roadmap?
03 / Make the priority real
John Cutler distinguishes judging priorities from creating the conditions to act on them. Recurring arguments, protected work and unfunded dependencies can reveal a decision that another scoring exercise would evade.
Pause here: What must stop, receive capacity or gain an owner for this priority to become real?
Norton's Google Docs case exposes a weakness of ranked lists: agreement on the word formatting concealed disagreement about the underlying problem and its urgency. Reforge tackles a different gap, between company intent and the team's roadmap. Read together, they suggest two checks before ranking work: are we describing the customer's problem accurately, and can we explain why solving it serves the company? Strategy without contact with users can justify the wrong work; a popular request without strategic context can pull the team in an arbitrary direction. Neither reading removes the need to make a trade-off. Their value is in identifying what the trade-off is actually about. Cutler then asks why a well-reasoned priority may still go nowhere. The gap can be displaced work, ownership or capacity rather than another missing score. That does not make prioritization analysis useless; it makes action on the analysis part of the decision.
Digna Legi synthesis of the linked readings, not a claim that the authors endorse this combined approach.
Put five minutes aside
Use paper or your own notes app. These prompts are Digna Legi’s exercise, drawn from the readings.
Before you leave: Which item on your roadmap would you change if you had to name both the customer problem it solves and the company strategy it serves?
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