When everything is a priority, the roadmap becomes a list of requests
Sales have an urgent customer need. Support asks for a fix. Leadership wants to launch a new offer. Engineering wants to tackle technical debt. A major customer asks for a feature.
Each request can be perfectly reasonable. The problem starts when they all go into the roadmap. Prioritising is not simply ranking topics: making trade-offs means accepting that some will not be done, or not now.
A typical situation
The requests that land in a roadmap are rarely absurd. An important customer asks for a useful improvement. Sales need an argument to close a deal. Support reports a real point of friction. Engineering wants to address technical debt that slows the team down.
The problem is therefore not telling good ideas from bad ones. It appears when all these reasonable requests become priorities at the same time. That is when the roadmap stops helping you decide and simply starts recording everyone’s expectations.
Step 1: start from objectives, not requests
Identify the objectives that really matter to the business over the period, the ones that revenue, margin, retention or the company’s ability to deliver its strategy depend on. What matters is not how many objectives there are, but how relevant they are. Then ask, for each initiative: which objective does it serve? If nobody can answer, the topic may not be a priority right now.
Step 2: turn requests into problems
“We need an Excel export” is a solution. “Our customers spend two hours a week reconciling data with their accounting” describes a problem. This reframing opens up several possible solutions and prevents a request made very early from automatically becoming a promise.
Step 3: make the criteria visible
Expected impact, effort, risk, urgency, dependencies: choose the criteria that fit your context and apply them consistently. What matters is being able to compare initiatives based on their impact on your objectives and the resources they require. If trade-offs can only be explained after a long meeting, the system is probably too complex or too implicit.
Step 4: own the trade-offs
The real work rarely starts when you have to say no to a bad idea. It starts when you have to say “not now” to a good request because another topic matters more. That is why the roadmap is as much a decision tool as a communication tool.
Step 5: separate roadmap from schedule
A roadmap can work by horizons:
- now;
- next;
- later;
- to be investigated.
The further out you look, the less a precise date means. The aim is to give visibility on direction and trade-offs, not to turn every assumption into a contractual commitment.
If disagreements persist
The problem may no longer be the roadmap. Then look at:
- who has the right to decide;
- who must be consulted;
- which objectives decisions should be anchored to;
- how requests come in;
- how often trade-offs are reviewed.
A roadmap cannot make up for unclear product governance.
The 5LEGS tools
The AI Roadmap & Prioritisation Agent lets you structure a first prioritisation exercise for free. Roadmap Scoping, at €2,800 excl. VAT, produces a roadmap and the prioritisation system the team can then reuse. Once the start date is agreed together, it takes on average between 4 and 6 working days.
For a specific question, PM Advice or CPO Advice may be enough. If the problem lies more in roles and decisions, the Product Organisation Diagnosis identifies what is really slowing the team down.
In short
A good roadmap is not the one that contains every good idea. It is the one that makes it clear why some good ideas move forward and others wait.
Related services
AI Roadmap & Prioritisation Agent
Free
Roadmap Scoping
€2,800 excl. VAT
PM Advice
On quote
Product Organisation Diagnosis
€5,000 excl. VAT
Related questions
We have a digital product idea: what should we check before development starts?
Before development starts, check at least the need, the target users, the main risks, the expected journey, the data required, the dependencies and what you need to learn first. The point is not to specify everything in advance, but to avoid investing in a solution before securing the decisions that are most expensive to change. As an example, at 5LEGS the Pre-development Product Diagnosis costs €3,500 excl. VAT.
I don’t need a full-time CPO, or can’t justify one: what are the alternatives?
You do not necessarily need to hire a CPO. If you need regular product leadership, a fractional CPO can play that role a few days a month. If the framework already exists and what is mainly missing is execution capacity, a freelance PM is the better fit. If you have a specific problem or piece of work to resolve within a few months, a product studio can take the topic on and then hand it over to the team. As an example, at 5LEGS an engagement of around 90 days led by three senior experts costs between €12,000 and €33,000 excl. VAT.
What can you realistically improve on a product in three months?
Three months are enough to diagnose a product, make several key decisions and put new ways of working in place. They are not necessarily enough to rebuild or develop everything that follows from them. A short engagement is therefore particularly suited to scoping, roadmap, user journeys, organisation, go-to-market and handover to the team. As an example, La Bonne Carte by 5LEGS, an engagement of around 90 days for the product team of an SME or scale-up, costs €33,000 excl. VAT.
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