The quarterly roadmap review isn’t about prioritizing work. It’s a pre-emptive alibi distribution system.
The Jira backlog? A totem you touch three times a week to ward off the terror of not knowing what’s actually important.
PI planning has become a two-day séance where fifty people pretend they can channel the future, generating Gantt charts like Ouija board messages.
These aren’t efficiency systems. They’re anxiety-management systems.
For twenty years, they worked. When shipping a feature required six months of engineering time and a million dollars in server racks, you needed elaborate rituals to manage the existential dread of being wrong. The roadmap gave executives something to point at. The backlog gave product managers air cover. The planning ceremonies gave everyone the warm, simulated feeling of predictability.
We built institutional scaffolding to manage our terror of scarcity. Then we told ourselves it was process optimization.
But the scarcity is gone.
Software is free now. An AI writes in forty minutes what used to take a team two weeks. You can spin up globally distributed infrastructure with a credit card swipe that used to require a six-month procurement dance.
Walk into any Fortune 500 engineering department and watch them perform the same rituals. Grooming backlogs for software that could ship before the grooming meeting ends. Building roadmaps that fossilize decisions when those decisions could be reversed with a git revert.
The anxiety-management systems have become the primary source of friction.
The Conservation of Organizational Anxiety
Here’s the perverse physics: anxiety doesn’t disappear when constraints vanish. It transforms.
You’re no longer anxious about whether you can build the thing—you absolutely can. You’re anxious about whether you have alignment. Whether you followed process. Whether you’ve CYA’d yourself if it fails.
So you keep running the ceremonies. Not because they help you ship—because they make you feel safe.
While you’re in your third meeting debating whether to prioritize the feature, someone else has already shipped it, gotten 10,000 users, discovered it’s the wrong feature, pivoted, shipped the right one, and is now hiring your best engineers.
The compliance team doesn’t want to say no. They want to see working software so they can point at actual risks. Show them a live product, and they’ll give you three specific things to harden. Show them a 50-page spec, and they’ll hand you a 200-page list of hypothetical nightmares.
When software is free, your strategy isn’t to eliminate friction—it’s to move so fast the friction becomes irrelevant.
What It Looks Like Without The Anxiety Theater
I built Cluster, a wine tracking app, at a vineyard in the Willamette Valley. Literally at the table, between sips of Pinot Noir.
A friend said, “I wish I could remember which vintage I liked.” I had a working prototype on her phone in ninety seconds. By the time the cheese board arrived, the entire table was scanning bottles. They wanted features: “Can we share tasting notes?” I pushed that live before the sommelier poured the second glass. “What if we had profiles of the wineries?” Built and deployed between the tastings of vintages.
No roadmap. No story points. Just: customer need → working software → immediate feedback → iteration.
This is what the Agile Manifesto actually said: working software over comprehensive documentation. Responding to change over following a plan.
We couldn’t do this when software was expensive. So we built cargo cult approximations—ceremonies that simulated agility while managing the terror of scarcity.
But the scaffolding was never the point.
Producers and Builders
Operating without anxiety-management systems requires collapsed structure.
Builders are the role collapse of designer, engineer, data scientist, and product manager. They have taste, can ship full-stack code, understand the data model, and make product decisions. When something needs to exist, they build the entire thing.
Producers are the role collapse of growth marketer, go-to-market strategist, and customer anthropologist. They find opportunities, shape problems, ensure what gets built gets used.
Traditional model: PM does discovery → writes PRD → hands to design → design → hands to engineering → waits for sprint → ships → realizes it’s wrong → creates “fast follow” ticket → cycle repeats. Six handoffs. Six opportunities for anxiety to metastasize into process.
Producer + Builder model: Producer watches customer struggle → Builder pairs live → builds solution in real time → customer uses it → iterate → move to next problem. No handoffs. No waiting. No anxiety-management ceremonies.
Two Builders and one Producer (who can also code) will outperform an organization of two hundred. Not because they’re superhuman—because they’re not carrying the metabolic load of managing terror that no longer exists.
If something is important enough to build, it ships today. If it’s not important enough to ship today, it’s not important.
You’re Moving at Ceremony Speed. They’re Moving at Conversation Speed.
A seed-stage startup just raised $5M to kill you. They don’t have roadmaps—they have a Notion doc that changes daily. They don’t have your process overhead—they have three Builders who ship to production before lunch.
They’re moving at conversation speed. You’re moving at ceremony speed.
They ship by 11am what you debate for six weeks. They hire your best people with promises of actually building things while you offer them grooming sessions.
Can you strip away the anxiety-management systems before they strip away your market share?
This Requires Nerve
Don’t try this if you need twelve approval layers to feel professional. If you’d rather have a perfect Gantt chart of a failed product than a messy working prototype. If you think the ceremonies are what separate you from chaos.
This is for people who understand: the illusion of predictability is far more lethal than accepting uncertainty and moving anyway.
The Choice
Strip away the pretense: that roadmap is anxiety management. The backlog is anxiety management. The PI planning is anxiety management.
They’re systems you built to manage fear of a world where shipping cost real money. That world is gone.
What remains is the fear itself, wrapped in ceremony, demanding to be fed with meetings and artifacts that don’t actually help you ship.
You can keep running the rituals. They’ll make you feel safer. More professional. And while you’re performing them, a team of four people in a WeWork will make your entire product category irrelevant.
Or strip them away. Build Producers and Builders who own outcomes. Ship at conversation speed. Accept the discomfort of actual uncertainty instead of the false comfort of anxiety-management theater.
Software is free now. The only thing standing between you and acting like it is your fear of finding out what happens when you do
Choose.