Or, Who Decides What Goes in ‘Next’? You can usually tell how solid a roadmap is about two weeks after it’s shared.That’s when “Now” starts to shift, “Next” gets debated again, and “Later” quietly grows. Nothing dramatic. No big reset. Just small adjustments that signal something wasn’t resolved the first time. Now/Next/Later, as a planning approach, is meant to make roadmaps more honest. Less performative certainty, more flexibility. It’s a useful correction to date-driven p

Product teams talk about risk constantly. They track it, mitigate it, escalate it, and reference it in nearly every decision discussion. What they rarely do is define it. As a result, “risk” becomes a vague proxy for unease. A catch-all label applied to disagreement, uncertainty, incomplete information, or the simple fear of being wrong. When that happens, risk stops being a tool for better decisions and starts functioning as a brake on them. Most stalled product decisions do

or, What to Do When Decisions Keep Getting Stuck There’s a particular kind of stuckness that shows up on capable product teams. It doesn’t look like chaos. The calendars are full. Research is happening. Dashboards get updated. Customer conversations are logged and circulated. Everyone involved can explain their point of view clearly and back it up with evidence. And yet “decisions” keep reopening. The roadmap shifts without really changing. Priorities feel provisional. Plann

Most product teams say they want fewer constraints. What they usually mean is fewer limits on ideas. Fewer gates. Fewer people telling them no. More room to explore. More freedom to imagine. It’s an understandable instinct. We see it all the time in our work at CoinJar Insights. But after decades of listening to customers, and after working closely with what we call Catalytic Customers, I’ve come to a different view. The right constraints don’t suffocate good ideas. They’re w

Planning season comes around like clockwork. Budgets, OKRs, capacity models, prioritization frameworks—the rituals of focus and alignment. On paper, it’s a time for clarity. In reality, it often feels like an annual stage play: certainty (captured neatly in PowerPoint) built on incomplete understanding. Every PM knows the pattern. The more polished the plan, too often the shakier the foundations beneath it. The Fiction of Certainty Most of what gets discussed in planning seas

Every product team I know carries some form of debt. Most think in terms of technical debt—the shortcuts taken in code that later slow development. But there’s another kind of liability that quietly shapes almost every roadmap, meeting, and feature decision: discovery debt . It’s what accumulates when a team moves faster than it learns. When assumptions outpace evidence. When a backlog fills with guesses disguised as insight. And unlike technical debt, which can be seen and m

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