prioritizing-roadmap

Prioritizing Roadmap

Scope

Covers

• Turning messy roadmap inputs into a ranked opportunity list + coherent roadmap
• Defining a planning “season” (macro context) and success criteria
• Using a common-currency scoring model (ICE + assumptions) to compare across teams
• Producing an alignment-ready Roadmap Prioritization Pack

When to use

• “What should we build next?”
• “We need a Q2/Q3 roadmap.”
• “We have too many requests and no way to compare them.”
• “We need to prioritize across multiple teams/pods.”

When NOT to use

• You don’t have any agreed goal / North Star / strategic intent (do product vision / goals first; use setting-okrs-goals).
• You need sprint planning or story-level estimation (use your agile/scrum process).
• You’re only choosing a single experiment within an already-fixed roadmap.
• You need a full customer discovery plan from scratch (use problem-definition).
• You need to cut scope within an already-committed project (use scoping-cutting).
• You need an engineering/technical roadmap for infrastructure or platform work (use technical-roadmaps).
• You need to track milestones, deadlines, and delivery status on an existing plan (use managing-timelines).

Inputs

Minimum required

• Product + primary customer segment
• Planning horizon + cadence (e.g., next 6 weeks, next quarter, rolling 12–24 months)
• Success criteria (North Star / business goal) + 2–5 guardrails
• Candidate opportunities (or current roadmap/backlog) with rough size/effort
• Constraints: capacity, commitments, dependencies, deadlines, risk tolerance

Missing-info strategy

• Ask up to 5 questions from references/INTAKE.md.
• If still missing, proceed with clearly labeled assumptions and provide 2–3 roadmap options.

Outputs (deliverables)

Produce a Roadmap Prioritization Pack in Markdown (in-chat; or as files if requested):

1. Context snapshot (goal, horizon, constraints, stakeholders)
2. Season framing (what changed, key bets, explicit non-goals)
3. Opportunity inventory with conviction level (known vs hypothesis) and evidence
4. Prioritization model (common currency + ICE scoring + assumptions)
5. Ranked opportunity list (top 10–20) + “parking lot”
6. Roadmap draft (Now/Next/Later or quarterly themes) + update cadence (rolling plan)
7. Decision narrative (why these, why now) + “Think Bigger” ideas
8. Risks / Open questions / Next steps (always included)