About to ship another feature? Ask these 5 first.

Roadmaps fill themselves the way unused drawers fill themselves: quietly, with things that once seemed important. Another feature feels like progress. Often it is only motion with a ticket number.

Features answer questions. The expensive mistake is answering questions nobody asked while the real job stays unnamed. Before you build, five questions separate roadmap theatre from useful work.

Build vs wait

**Bad SaaS habit:** shipping parity features because a competitor demoed them, then wondering why activation stayed flat. **Good SaaS habit:** freezing the roadmap until five customers describe the same stuck moment in their own words.

**Bad consumer product:** adding app features to a hardware story that was never clear. **Good consumer product:** fixing the unboxing or first-use failure before adding a second screen of settings. Outdoor and travel brands make the same mistake when they expand SKUs instead of clarifying the job.

What to do before the next ticket

1. Write the feature in one sentence as a customer outcome, not a UI description.
2. Attach evidence: interview notes, support tickets, or usage drop-offs.
3. Name who does not get this feature. Vague “everyone” usually means no one.
4. Define the first-win path in under seven days of use.
5. State what you will delay or cut to fund it.
6. Set a kill or rewrite date with one metric. No metric, no ship.

Jobs-to-be-done thinking still helps; start at Harvard Business Review. For opportunity cost and focus, Y Combinator’s Library is blunt in a useful way. Also: hidden cost of building features nobody asked for.