# Roadmap and Opportunity Prioritization

## Purpose

Choose what to do next by comparing opportunities, maintenance work, and strategic bets against explicit decision criteria.

## When to use

- Too many plausible initiatives compete for limited time
- Feature work and maintenance work need to be balanced
- A team needs a more defensible roadmap discussion
- Promising ideas need sequencing rather than more generation

## Inputs to gather

- Candidate initiatives or workstreams
- Decision criteria such as impact, urgency, effort, risk reduction, or strategic fit
- Dependencies, timing constraints, and team capacity
- Evidence for expected payoff or avoided risk

## How to work

- Make prioritization criteria explicit before ranking work.
- Compare user value, strategic value, and risk reduction together.
- Treat maintenance and enabling work as first-class opportunities when they materially improve future delivery.
- Distinguish what is urgent, what is high leverage, and what is merely attractive.
- Produce a sequence that a team can actually act on.

## Output expectations

- Prioritized list or roadmap recommendation
- Clear rationale for order and tradeoffs
- Notes on what to defer, revisit, or validate next

## Quality checklist

- Priorities reflect stated criteria rather than intuition alone.
- Sequencing respects dependencies and capacity.
- Lower-priority items are deferred for a reason, not forgotten accidentally.
- Maintenance work is evaluated on outcomes, not optics.

## Handoff notes

- Note what new evidence would most change the ranking.
- Pair with maintenance and technical debt planning or structured brainstorming when the decision needs deeper shaping.