Your Roadmap Ranks Everything. It Rejects Nothing.

Дата публикации: 06-09-2026 06:00:00

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Take the product strategy slide from your last quarterly review and write the opposite of every line underneath it. "Deepen engagement in our core segment" becomes "shed engagement in our core segment." "Improve time to value for new customers" becomes "slow new customers down." If every opposite reads as obviously idiotic, nobody in that room made a choice. They wrote a plan and put a strategy label on it.Roger Martin published that test in October 2020, in the first month of a weekly run he closed on 16 February 2026 after 260 essays and roughly 470,000 words. One sentence from the beginning does more work in a product review than everything after it: "a choice the opposite of which is stupid on its face is not a strategy choice."Operating Imperatives Wearing Strategy ClothingMartin separates two things that look identical on a slide. Operating imperatives are the ones where the opposite is absurd. Be operationally effective. Invest in talent. Care about customers. Organizations have to make innumerable choices where the opposite is stupid on its face, he writes, they just do not rise to the level of a strategy choice.Strategy choices are the ones where a competitor is doing the opposite and winning. Jack Bogle offering only passively managed index funds qualified, because offering actively managed funds was not stupid, and Fidelity was busy proving it.Run this over a product plan and most of it sorts left. Reliability, security, accessibility, page speed: nobody ships the opposite, so none of them separates two companies. A question that does separate them rarely reaches paper, which is how thick a slice of the value system a company intends to own. Intel took a thin slice in logic chips, Microsoft a thin slice in PC operating systems, Apple a thick one integrating hardware and software in the iPhone. Both directions built enormous companies. Martin's note on that decision matters here: it is "often an implicit choice" rather than a deliberate one.Implicit choices are what a process produces when it never asks anyone to reject anything.Ranking Is Not ChoosingLook at the decision machinery product development built. RICE, WSJF, MoSCoW, ICE, weighted scoring. Each one takes a set of candidate items and returns the same set in a different order. That is a sort, not a filter. The output always contains everything the input contained.The vocabulary gives it away. Items are never rejected. They are deprioritized, which means position 47 on a list of 200, and next quarter they might climb to 31 or descend to 71.Sachin Rekhi, CEO of Notejoy, names the structural problem: "RICE is divorced from strategy. The framework evaluates initiatives purely on potential impact versus effort. It says nothing about whether an initiative advances your product strategy." Multiplying rough estimates, he adds, produces "precisely calculated guesswork," and "most of the roadmaps I see from teams are largely incremental."Every other decision artifact in a company records the option that lost. An investment memo names the alternative use of the capital. A hiring decision has a runner up. The roadmap records only the yeses. It carries no field for the thing that was turned down, which is why a strategy and a to-do list arrive in the same shape. In July I argued that cheap output makes it hard to hide a weak strategy. The roadmap is where it hides.What Never Saying No CostsPendo measured feature usage across 615 customer subscriptions over three months and found that 80 percent of features in the average software product are rarely or never used, with 12 percent of features generating 80 percent of average daily usage volume. The 29.5 billion dollar figure attached to that study rests on a chain of extrapolations. The distribution does not. That is 2019 telemetry from a single vendor, and it describes the arithmetic of adding without subtracting.Marty Cagan saw the same distribution from the inside. Companies that struggle with focus do not lack priorities: "Instead of 2-3 truly important things, they have at least 20-30."The 2026 Product Focus survey puts numbers on the view from a product manager's chair. Across 677 respondents in 40 countries, October 2025 to January 2026, 33 percent report a weak or missing company strategy and 34 percent have no clear primary metric for accountability. The two findings travel together: people reporting weak strategy are 15 percentage points more likely to lack a primary metric. A metric tracks progress toward something chosen. Where nothing was chosen, nothing is left for it to track.Two Objections That HoldFirst, plenty of product work genuinely is hygiene, and hygiene has to get done. Imperatives deserve funding rather than contempt. The error is filing them under strategy, then wondering why it fails to distinguish your company from the one across the street.Second, holding options open is often correct. When carrying an option costs little and the deciding information arrives later, waiting beats committing. Also true.Neither objection covers what actually happens. Check the age of the bottom quartile of your backlog. If those items are three years old and have drifted up and down without ever being killed, they are not live options. They are decisions nobody was willing to make, kept in a format that hides the avoidance.37signals handles it entirely differently. Chapter 7 of Shape Up is titled "Bets, Not Backlogs," and opens with the reason: "Backlogs are a big weight we don't need to carry." When a pitch loses at the betting table, "we let it go. There's nothing we need to track or hold on to." Anyone who still believes in it lobbies again six weeks later.Apply Martin's test. The opposite, keeping a carefully refined backlog, is what nearly every product organization does, and it is not stupid on its face. Which is what makes the 37signals version a strategy choice rather.Running the TestStart with the sort. Write the opposite of every line in your product strategy, then split them into two columns, imperatives left and choices right. An empty right column means an operating plan. Say that out loud, because a plan carrying a strategy label is the most effective way to stop anyone asking for the real one.Then name names. For each survivor in the right column, identify a company doing the opposite and succeeding. If no name comes, the choice is the industry default and buys nothing.The third takes a quarter to pay off. Open a rejection register: one page filed beside the roadmap, listing three things: what the team decided not to build, who is measurably worse off for it, and the date. When a sales escalation overrides the ranking, and it will, write down what came off the list to make room. If nothing came off and everything below simply moved down a slot, the ranking was never a decision. It was scoring.Martin grades the five boxes of his cascade against every strategy he has seen, and How-to-Win comes last. The recurring weakness is that it turns out to be a list of initiatives, what he calls "a list of pixels, not a portrait." Product roadmaps are the highest resolution pixel lists ever produced.The next time somebody asks for the product strategy, hand over the page listing what you turned down. If that page is empty, the other one was never a strategy.Ralph Jocham is Europe's first Professional Scrum Trainer, co-author of "Professional Product Owner," and contributor to the Scrum Guide Expansion Pack. As an ICF ACC certified coach, he works with organizations to build Product Operating Models where strategic clarity, operational excellence, and adaptive learning create measurable competitive advantage. Learn more at effective agile.References[1] Martin, R. (2020) 'Is the Opposite of Your Choice Stupid on its Face?', Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights, 12 October. Source of the test itself, the operating imperative versus strategy choice distinction, and the Bogle/Vanguard example. Available at: https://rogerlmartin.substack.com/p/2020-10-12_is-the-opposite-of-your-choice-stupid-on-its-face-5b247ffd7f94html[2] Martin, R. (2026) 'The End of an Era & an Agenda Going Forward', 16 February. Series close: 5 years and 4 months, 260 original pieces, roughly 470,000 words, and the "1,800 words of new content every week is too much" quote. Available at: https://rogerlmartin.substack.com/p/the-end-of-an-era-and-an-agenda-going[3] Martin, R. (2025) 'Through Thick & Thin: Thinking More Strategically About Where-to-Play', 2 June. Source of the thin slice versus thick slice distinction, the Intel, Microsoft and Apple iPhone examples, and the "often an implicit choice" observation. Available at: https://rogerlmartin.substack.com/p/2025-06-02_through-thick-thin-6db5882b0251html[4] Martin, R. (2025) 'Why the How-to-Win Strategy Choice is So Hard', 3 November. Source of the lowest grade across the five boxes and the "list of pixels, not a portrait" phrase. Available at: https://rogerlmartin.substack.com/p/why-the-how-to-win-strategy-choice[5] Cagan, M. (2020) 'Product Strategy - Focus', Silicon Valley Product Group, 18 February. Source of the 2-3 versus 20-30 priorities observation. Available at: https://www.svpg.com/product-strategy-focus/[6] Productboard (2025) 'Beyond RICE: A Strategic Framework for Annual Product Planning', 26 November, featuring Sachin Rekhi. Source of the divorced-from-strategy critique, "precisely calculated guesswork," and the incremental roadmaps observation. Available at: https://www.productboard.com/blog/strategic-framework-for-annual-planning/[7] Pendo (2019) '2019 Feature Adoption Report', 5 February, lead data scientist Suja Thomas. 615 Pendo subscriptions from customers of more than a year, usage aggregated over three months: 80 percent of features rarely or never used, 12 percent of features generating 80 percent of average daily usage volume. The 29.5 billion dollar figure is an extrapolation built on Gartner's 2018 public cloud revenue forecast and average R&D spend across the Bessemer Emerging Cloud Index, and is treated here as indicative only. Available at: https://go.pendo.io/rs/185-LQW-370/images/2019 Feature Adoption Report Digital.pdf[8] Product Focus (2026) '2026 Survey of the Product Management Profession'. 677 respondents from 40 countries, 83 percent Europe, responses collected October 2025 to January 2026. Source of the 33 percent weak or missing company strategy figure, the 34 percent with no clear primary metric, and the 44 percent versus 29 percent split. Available at: https://www.productfocus.com/product-management-resources/profession-survey/[9] Singer, R. 'Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters', 37signals, chapter 7, 'Bets, Not Backlogs'. Available at: https://basecamp.com/shapeup/2.1-chapter-07

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