Main idea

Every topic that reaches a roadmap arrives with a force behind it. A sales request carried by a major account, a repeated support pain, a market opportunity spotted by an executive: none of these pressures is illegitimate, and that is exactly what makes adding them together dangerous. Adding up legitimate requests does not produce a direction, it produces a map of the company's balance of power.

Avoiding that addition means putting every topic through named risks rather than through the intensity of its arrival. The four product risks popularized by Marty Cagan do the job: is it good for the business, does the customer want to buy it, does the user want to use it, is it technically feasible. A loud topic that fails one of them stays loud; it does not become a priority.

The point of the filter is not to reject incoming requests. It is to make them come in through a door where their volume does not count.

Why it matters

It gives the Product Manager a defensible answer to a pressure they cannot contest on the substance — the topic is real, the customer exists, the pain is true. The refusal no longer bears on the legitimacy of the request but on an identified risk.

It also explains why some roadmaps look incoherent even though every line is justified: they are coherent, but with the organization rather than with the market.

Nuances and limits

Incoming pressures carry real information. A recurring sales request is a market signal, a support pain is a measure of usage; dismissing them on principle would cut you off from the field.

And the risk filter is not neutral: it favors topics whose risk is easy to document, at the expense of bets where none of the four can be cleared in advance.

Open questions

• How do you handle a topic that fails a product risk but whose refusal would cost a strategic customer?