Roadmap prioritization leans on heuristics under uncertainty and often kills the best ideas.

Prioritization relies heavily on our ability to discern good ideas from bad. Experience, intuition, and logic play a central role. However, the question “which of these 20 ideas will best achieve the goals” is a very complex one, and often there’s not enough information to answer it. Our brains are definitely not designed to deal with so much uncertainty, and we’re likely to subconsciously revert to mental shortcuts and heuristics to lighten the cognitive burden — risk aversion, halo effects, groupthink and many more. Some of the best ideas are novel, counterintuitive, or unimpressive, so they may not do well here.