tech
Your Prototype Graveyard Is Leaking Secrets. The Prototype Classifier + Demotion Audit Decide What Stays
Product management has always been a rationing job. Most ideas would not get built. Engineering time was scarce. Coordination was slow. A roadmap was partly a strategy document and partly a rationing system, and product managers helped decide which customer problems, executive priorities, technical constraints, and market bets deserved the company’s limited ability to make software.
TL;DR
- The old roadmap filter is broken because the cost of a first version of software has collapsed.
- Product management is shifting from rationing engineering time to classifying software abundance into market value, internal reliance, or deletion.
- Microsoft employees have built over 1 million Power Platform citizen-development assets, illustrating the scale of this shift.
- The new model requires classifying what already exists, rather than deciding what to build.
- Key tools include a four-state ladder for classifying built tools and demotion triggers to identify software that is no longer earning its keep.
- Two prompts are offered to classify employee-built tools and audit existing supported tools for demotion.