A quick note before the idea: this issue came out of a conversation with a PM who had just been through a quarterly planning round and described it, accurately, as an argument with a spreadsheet in the room.
Here is the idea. A roadmap is a list of refusals wearing the costume of a list of plans. Every committed initiative consumes engineering weeks that other work needed, and the refusals almost never appear in the document. So the team gets credit for the commitments and takes the blame for the deferrals, which nobody agreed to explicitly.
The fix is not a better model. It is one extra column: what this displaces. Adding it changes the meeting from a defence of your ranking into a shared decision about allocation, and it moves the argument to where it belongs.
Try it in the next planning session. Write the displacement line for your top three commitments before anyone else speaks.
— Genesis