Comment by abeppu
14 hours ago
... but you have a staff that can come up with ideas, and now you can say yes to more of them.
"Infinite growth" framing is asking a lot, but for most of my career, I've seen teams, departments or companies solicit ideas of what to do next quarter/year/whatever, and really aggressively winnow it down -- in large part b/c there weren't enough people to do it (and we could only afford so many people).
And we were _bad_ at prioritizing; we'd often have like a list of multiple things declared P0 and a longer list of things called P1, and a stack of stuff that didn't make the cut to maybe revisit in the future.
But if the same number of people can build and ship and iterate faster, then why not do more?
You can say yes to more of them, _but they still need to be worth it._ If you have an infinite well of ideas to grow your business, awesome. But there are a lot of companies that just don't have those ideas, where their growth is limited on some other factor related to the market they're in.
My experience is that "asking staff for ideas" does not lead to successful products. Sometimes, sure, but in general it does not.
I've never seen a roadmap planning process that didn't involve some component of asking departments and teams what needs to be done.
To the extent you have successful products, it's because you have product managers and engineers and data scientists and depending on the product, integration/forward deployed staff. These should be the people with a view to how the product needs to meet the needs of future customers, the challenges faced by existing customers, and the technical components needed to get there. I'm not saying you encourage them to just spitball ideas from ignorance, I'm saying you solicit their expertise on the limits and needs of your products, systems, tools, processes, messaging etc.