Product & Delivery · Chapter 1 of 8
Prioritisation that survives contact
Frameworks produce rankings, not decisions. This is about the three things that actually determine what ships.
Every product manager can describe RICE or MoSCoW. Almost none of the difficulty is in the scoring — anyone can move a reach estimate to change the ranking, and pretending the framework decided hides who actually decided. The difficulty is in three things the framework does not touch.
First: what is the business actually measured on this year
Not the mission statement — the number the executive team reports upward. Nearly every prioritisation argument is a disagreement about that, conducted without anyone naming it. Once it is explicit, a surprising number of contested items resolve themselves, because it becomes obvious which ones cannot move it.
Second: what is the constraint
Is the business constrained by demand (we cannot sell it), delivery (we cannot build it fast enough) or retention (we lose them after we sell it)? A forty-item backlog will contain plausible work for all three, and only one of them is your quarter. Building beautifully against the wrong constraint is the most expensive mistake available to a product manager, and it is invisible at the time.
Third: how much capacity actually exists
What a decision looks like, as opposed to a ranking
Three things, each with what it is meant to move, plus an explicit not doing list. The second half is what makes it a decision; a ranked list of forty items is a ranked list of forty items.
And state which of the three you expect to be wrong about, and how you would find out by mid-quarter rather than at the end. A roadmap with no falsification point is a forecast dressed as a plan.