Decidi for product managers
Pressure-test the bet before engineering builds the wrong thing.
Have the engineer, the user and the skeptic challenge the spec before a sprint is spent — so what gets built is the thing that was actually worth building.
- Stress-test the problem statement: are you solving the user’s real pain or your roadmap’s convenience?
- Have an engineering lens flag the spec ambiguity that becomes three days of rework.
- Run a pre-mortem on the launch: assume the feature flopped, then find out why.
- Surface the edge cases and failure states a PRD always forgets until QA finds them.
- Pressure-test prioritisation — the thing you cut might have been the thing that mattered.
- Get the user’s actual objection, not the persona you wrote to feel comfortable.
- The problem statement — real user pain vs. assumed pain
- The spec — ambiguity that turns into rework
- Success metrics — are you measuring the right thing?
- Edge cases, empty states and failure modes
- Prioritisation — what you’re cutting and why
- The launch — the pre-mortem on why it could flop
Say you own next quarter’s roadmap and the shortlist is down to four: the enterprise SSO two big prospects keep raising, the mobile app the CEO wants, the billing rework support keeps bleeding tickets over, and the AI feature every competitor just shipped.
Each candidate gets an owner in the debate: the End-User Advocate argues from what current users actually suffer (usually the billing tickets), the Data Skeptic audits the evidence behind each item — two prospects “raising” SSO is not two prospects committing to buy — and the Software Architect prices the technical debt each path creates or retires. The Pre-Mortem Analyst runs the quarter backwards from failure for the top two candidates, and the Devil’s Advocate defends whichever item the room has quietly decided to dismiss. The synthesis is a ranked roadmap with a one-line rationale per item, an explicit not-now list you can hand to stakeholders, and the metric that will tell you in thirty days whether the call was right.
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