One of the ways I like to encourage pruning is to think about work in terms of experiments: We all know we’re supposed to run a bunch of experiments against problems in order to figure out what’s going to make the biggest impact.. but the trick with experiments is to widen your usual definition of them (and it’s not just A/B tests!) For example, an experiment might be to add a feature… but just as well, the experiment could be to remove a feature, or change a feature, or not even be related to a feature at all (could be a test in pricing, packaging, proposition, etc). That way, the roadmap isn’t just a list of new features to build, but a series of experiments that could add and remove and adjust the product in a bunch of ways!

I am presently working on a project to -de-crapify their product.

Thankfully, I have Prune the Product Tree at my disposal. Not “add more crappy features to my bloated product for the wrong reasons” Product Tree.

Pruning is liberating. And it helps deal with this problem directly.

I wish more roadmapping processes / templates would celebrate the *removal* of features.