Digital Products — Portfolio Strategy¶
Goal¶
This venture's product portfolio is meant to be durable and useful, not voluminous. The backlog (../../portfolio/product-backlog.md) currently lists 28 candidate product ideas across four categories. That breadth exists to map the opportunity space, not as a commitment to build all of them, or to build them quickly. Success for this venture looks like a small number of products that genuinely solve a customer's problem well, not a large catalog of shallow templates.
Evidence-gated prioritization¶
No product moves from "backlog idea" to "in build" without clearing a research gate. Concretely:
- A backlog item starts with a problem hypothesis and no committed build.
- Research (see ../../portfolio/research-backlog.md) is used to test whether the problem is real, whether the target customer is reachable, and whether a structured tool is the right shape of solution.
- Only after research provides reasonable confidence does an item move toward a
product specification (
products/<slug>/) and eventually a build. - This gate is deliberately conservative. It is acceptable, and expected, for many backlog items to never be built.
This is the same evidence-gated logic used by the company-level artifact lifecycle (../../../../docs/architecture/artifact-lifecycle.md) applied at the venture's portfolio-selection layer.
How prioritization works¶
The actual scoring approach — the dimensions used to rank backlog items once research starts producing signal — is described in ../../portfolio/prioritization-model.md. This document intentionally does not duplicate that model; it states the philosophy that governs it:
- Problem clarity over category breadth. A well-understood problem in a "less exciting" category beats a vague problem in a trendy one.
- Complexity should be justified. Higher-complexity products need a correspondingly higher-confidence problem and differentiation case before they're worth the build effort.
- Reuse lowers the bar, not the standard. A product that can lean heavily on existing components is cheaper to build, which affects sequencing, but it must still meet the same quality bar as a from-scratch product.
- No item is pre-committed. Nothing in the current backlog is scheduled. Being listed is not being promised.
Current state¶
As of this writing, the portfolio has zero prioritized or scheduled items. All 28 backlog entries are unranked and awaiting research. See roadmap.md for the honest state of what's actually planned (nothing, yet).