Nobody ever asked for them again.
The five features I pulled from the roadmap in Q3. Five features everyone wanted. That the VP had promised. That sales had negotiated into three deals.
Six months later: not one complaint. As if they had never existed.
(Before you explain why your case is different — it probably isn’t. Read on anyway.)
The problem nobody names
Marty Cagan puts it better than I can: most product teams are feature teams that believe they are empowered. They have a Jira board, OKRs, a standup. But somebody else decided the list. The team executes. And when it fails, nobody quite knows whose fault it was.
→ Cagan, M. — “Product vs. Feature Teams”, SVPG
The backlog is the symptom. The problem is that nobody has the authority — or the nerve — to say no.
flowchart TD
S[Stakeholder / CEO] -->|requests feature| R[Roadmap]
R -->|assigns| FT[Feature team]
FT -->|ships| O1[Output: feature shipped]
O1 -.->|who is accountable
when it doesn't work?| S
P[Business problem] -->|assigned to| ET[Empowered team]
ET -->|discovers + ships| O2[Outcome: business metric]
O2 -.->|accountability| ET
style S fill:#4a3b00,stroke:#fab400
style FT fill:#4a3b00,stroke:#fab400
style P fill:#1d3b26,stroke:#4ade80
style ET fill:#1d3b26,stroke:#4ade80What Shape Up understood
Basecamp formalised something few teams actually practise: the betting table. Every six weeks you don’t prioritise — you bet. A fixed time budget goes on a limited number of projects. Whatever isn’t picked doesn’t wait in a backlog. It disappears. If it genuinely matters, it comes back on its own next cycle.
→ Singer, R. — “Shape Up”, basecamp.com/shapeup
The fundamental difference: in Shape Up the default is “no”. In most teams the default is “later” — which is a polite way of never deciding.
What a rural fablab taught me about budgets
As a side project, I launched an associative fablab, a social-economy local endeavour. The total budget was €23,000. Not per month. €23,000 for everything.
When you have €23,000, every expense is visible, discussed, arbitrated collectively. Nobody adds “just one small thing” to the budget, because every small thing shows up immediately.
In a startup, the equivalent of a budget is the team’s time. Except nobody visualises it with the same discipline. We add features the way we add SaaS subscriptions: one at a time, never looking at the total.
The three questions
Back to the meeting room. Tuesday, 2pm. Twelve features on the board.
I asked three questions about each one. Does it reduce churn or increase ARPU? Can we test it without building it? Do we know how to remove it if it fails?
Five didn’t pass. We pulled them. The remaining seven shipped on time. Velocity doubled. Runway extended by six months. Not because the team worked faster — because it stopped burning cognitive energy arbitrating everything at once.
And the five features we pulled?
Nobody ever asked for them again.
Sources
- Cagan, M. — Empowered, Wiley
- Singer, R. — Shape Up, basecamp.com/shapeup
- Cocoshaker — social-economy incubator, cocoshaker.fr