A 6-week, senior-led engagement that turns "we have too many ideas" into a defensible Now/Next/Later roadmap. Built from real customer discovery, scored against impact and effort, and tied to the metrics that make your investors nod.
SA founders we audit have three things in common: too many ideas, too few users to talk to, and a Trello board with 87 cards. Here's the pattern we see every time.
"The CEO mentioned it." "The biggest customer asked for it." "It came up in a board call." Loudest voice wins — not the highest-impact opportunity.
"What ships next?" instead of "what problem are we solving?" Every two weeks, more output, less outcome. Velocity climbs, retention doesn't.
Last user interview was six months ago. We're shipping based on what the team thinks users want. Every release rolls a dice on retention.
The backlog only grows. Nothing ever gets killed. The team spends 30% of cycles maintaining features that 4% of users touch. Quietly bleeding.
Most teams jump straight to the roadmap (layer 4) without ever doing layers 1–3. The roadmap is the easy part. The diagnostic and the discovery underneath are where the real strategy lives.
Every roadmap item lands on the same 2×2 matrix. The quick-wins quadrant is where you spend Q2. The big-bets quadrant is where you make a deliberate strategic call. And the bottom-right quadrant is where you actively defund — kill, don't backlog.
Building first and asking later is how teams ship the wrong thing. We use 8 lightweight techniques to validate at the cheapest possible stage — depending on the question and the risk.
1-on-1 jobs-to-be-done interviews. 6–12 per cycle. Open-ended, never leading. The single highest-ROI activity in product.
Build the button, not the feature. Measure click-through, count signups for "coming soon" — kill the feature if nobody clicks.
Figma prototype, real users, observation. See where they get stuck, what they expect, what they call things.
Look automated, run manually. Validate that customers will actually use a workflow before automating it. We do this for AI features all the time.
What features are actually used? Where do users drop off? Mixpanel / PostHog instrumentation tells you the truth your stakeholders don't.
Don't argue about copy in a meeting. Ship both, measure, decide. Only useful when traffic supports statistical significance.
Ship to 5–20 friendly customers first. Get feedback before everyone sees the bug. Standard for high-stakes changes.
Test pricing in real conversations before publishing it. The Van Westendorp model. Avoid the "we'll know when we launch" tax.
We use the right tool for the question. The frameworks below are the ones we lean on most; we'll only apply the ones that match your situation.
No 100-page strategy decks. Six punchy artefacts your team can ship from on Monday. All in Notion / Linear / Figma — your team can edit without us.
Coded themes from 10–15 user interviews. Direct quotes, opportunity statements, surprising findings. The evidence the rest of the strategy stands on.
Who the product is for, what jobs they hire it to do, what would make them fire it. Tight enough to fit on one wall.
The tree of what we're going after, why, and the candidate solutions for each opportunity. Editable in your tool of choice.
The headline artefact. 12–20 prioritised initiatives. Each with a hypothesis, success metric, RICE score, owner, and effort estimate.
One north-star metric. 3–5 leading indicators. Each initiative tied to the metric it should move. Cadence + ownership.
The continuous-discovery operating manual: how to recruit, run, code and act on weekly interviews. So this isn't a one-shot engagement.
You'll spend ~12 hours across the engagement. Most of it observing user interviews (highly recommended) + a 2-day prioritisation workshop in week 4.
Backlog, analytics, NPS, support tickets. The baseline reality before we layer strategy on top.
10–15 user interviews. We run them; you observe at least 3. Themes coded, synthesised, evidence-tagged.
2-day in-person workshop. Opportunity tree, RICE scoring, defunding decisions, Now/Next/Later drafted.
Stakeholder review (eng, sales, CS), KPI scorecard, hypothesis docs, ownership locked in.
Discovery-cadence playbook installed. Your team runs week-1 of continuous discovery with us shadowing.
Aggregated from product teams we engaged 6+ months ago. Your numbers will be yours — these are the order-of-magnitude bracket.
Fee fixed in writing. The strategy is yours — implementation is your team's job. We don't ship features; we shape the strategy that informs which features you ship.
If yours isn't here, send us your current roadmap — we'll come back with a written critique in 48h. No sales call.
Export your current Trello / Linear / Notion backlog and drop it in our form. Within 48 hours we'll send back a written critique: which items look high-leverage, which look like noise, and which 3 we'd defund tomorrow. Plus an honest read on whether a full engagement is right for you.