When a deal falls apart on completeness, the postmortem lands on the roadmap. Wrong building, most of the time.
Take the four rings seriously and ask who owns each one. Engineering owns the generic product, which is the ring everybody argues about in the meeting. The expected product — documentation, onboarding, a service level somebody will honor at three in the morning — belongs to support and delivery. The augmented product, meaning the integrations and the marketplace listing and the co-delivery motion, sits with partnerships and product together. And the potential product, what a customer could do with this in three years, is marketing and strategy, which is usually where it goes to die if we’re honest about it.
One ring out of four is engineering’s. The rest belong to people who weren’t in that meeting.
Which is why “we’ll build it” answers the ring you already had. The gap is usually a contract, a process, or a phone number, and I have yet to see a sprint fix any of those.
[[ BOB → who owns ring two at SCB today? If the answer is “nobody, formally,” that’s the sharpest line in the note. ]]