Your strategy isn’t dying in the roadmap. It’s dying in the intake form.
The process nobody designed is still making your decisions.
I was two years into a job once and we’d just finished rolling out the new intake process. Third time in four years.
Capital-P Process this time. There was a form. There was a triage meeting. There was a color-coded prioritization rubric that somebody’s new Product Ops hire had been very proud of.
Six weeks later, I was DMing the PM on another team to ask if we could squeeze in a thing for a VP.
I was the problem. So were you. So was most of the building.
For years, I thought this was a strategy problem. We didn’t have a clear enough vision. Or we hadn’t communicated it enough.
Or the slides were wrong, the deck needed illustrations, the exec team needed a better offsite. So we’d rewrite the strategy, I’d feel productive for about eleven days, and then we’d be right back in the same spot, shipping things that technically nobody had committed to, and that definitely weren’t on the poster in the kitchen.
Turns out I was rewriting the wrong document. The intake form was where decisions actually got made.
Your team has an intake process. If you didn’t design one, that doesn’t get you out of having one.
Whatever happens by default is your intake process: who asks, how, through what channel, who gets to say yes. All of it is quietly making strategic decisions on your behalf.
Every intake, designed or otherwise, answers the same five questions.
Who gets to submit? What does it cost them to submit? What criteria does the request get weighed against? Who can say no and have “no” actually mean no? What happens to the requester when the answer is no?
In almost every org I’ve worked at, the default answers looked the same.
Anyone could submit. The cost was a Slack message. Evaluation was based on gut feel or whoever was loudest at the last all-hands.
The PM was technically the decider, right up until someone at the VP level mentioned the thing in passing, at which point the prioritization framework folded like a card table.
(Side note: every time I’ve tried to explain this to a non-PM, they look at me like I’ve just admitted we don’t have a process. Which, yeah, basically.)
That’s a queue with feelings dressed up as a strategy.
Three or four times at different companies, I’ve watched a team install a real intake process from scratch. New forms, new meetings, new frameworks, sometimes a new tool.
The pattern was always the same. Somebody drove it hard for about a month. Things felt clean.
Then the sprint would tighten, an exec would grumble, and we’d quietly slip back into whatever shape the old thing had.
Every failed attempt died the same way. Nobody owned the decision by sprint.
There’s a difference between having a process and having a human whose job it is to look at the queue on Tuesday morning at 10 am and say yes or no. When the second one is missing, the first one is paperwork.
For anyone who wants data before they buy this, Pendo analyzed feature usage across 615 customer subscriptions and found that 80% of features in the average software product are rarely or never used.
Their back-of-the-napkin math put that at around $29.5 billion a year, collectively spent by public cloud companies on features nobody meaningfully uses.
Eight out of ten features your team has ever built. Statistically. Sitting there doing nothing.
And the roadmap worked. Those features were on it. They got prioritized, sized, scoped, delivered, and probably celebrated with a pizza emoji in a release channel.
What broke was the thing that decides what gets onto the roadmap in the first place.
If you want to check whether this is happening at your place, pull the last ten things your team shipped.
For each one, ask three questions: where did the request actually come from, what did it go through before it became a committed item, and does it map to the strategy you’re telling the company you’re executing.
If more than three of those ten items flunk the last question, your intake is your strategy.
The deck is a comfort object, doing emotional work, which is probably why rewriting it never seems to help.
Final Thoughts
Strategy is a system of trade-offs. Saying yes to A means saying no to B.
Intake is where those no’s actually get said, or where they quietly don’t.
So the actual work is unglamorous. The form. The meeting. Whoever owns the answer on a given Tuesday.
I’ve been the guy DMing the PM. I’ve also been the PM getting DM’d. Neither seat feels great.
The fix has always been the same. Someone with the standing to say no, and the calendar space to say it on time.
Everything else is theater.
Mike Watson @ Product Party
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