Main idea

A product topic that nobody has said will be done, and that nobody has said will not be done, is not at rest. It comes back in meetings, it gets rediscussed, it reappears in a round table, someone asks where it stands. It has produced nothing and it consumes all the same — attention, meeting time, and that mental space taken up by something you know is unsettled.

This is the worst-counted consequence of a product team that works seriously without making calls. Piling up studies, workshops, analyses and hypotheses leaves behind just as many open topics, and an open topic never closes by itself. It rots where it stands.

The cost is therefore not that of abandoned topics. It is that of topics neither committed nor abandoned, whose number rises with every cycle in which concluding was avoided.

Why it matters

It requalifies a frequent complaint — "we don't have enough time" — into something else: what is lacking is a legible direction, and the load that weighs comes first from what stays open, not from what is left to do.

It also gives the refusal a value that does not show up in the usual calculation. Turning a topic down does not only free delivery capacity: it frees the space the topic was taking up in conversations.

Nuances and limits

Some topics have to stay open because the information that would settle them does not exist yet. What distinguishes them is not duration, it is that you know what you are waiting for.

And closing is not enough to free anything: a topic refused without a written reason comes back anyway, carried by the same person, at the next round table.

Open questions

• How do you spot a team's open topics, when by definition they exist in no maintained list?