All articles on Strategy.
I often walk into a planning session knowing that a significant portion of my team’s capacity is already spoken for. Not by features. Not by tech debt. By compliance. And when I present a roadmap that reflects this reality, colleagues look at it and ask: “Why is Q2 so thin?” It isn’t thin. It’s honest. But most roadmaps in regulated industries aren’t.
Most product teams I’ve worked with believe they have a strategy. They can talk about it in meetings, reference it in planning sessions, and nod along when leadership mentions it. But when I ask a simple question, “Can you show it to me?”, the room gets quiet. That silence tells me more about the state of a product organization than any roadmap ever could.
A debt sprint is a confession, not a strategy. It’s an admission that debt was never part of normal prioritization, dressed up as a responsible act. If you’re a PM who has ever scheduled one, you already know this. You felt the relief when it landed on the roadmap, and you felt the velocity drop resume two sprints later. Technical debt doesn’t accumulate despite your backlog decisions. It accumulates because of them.