Who they are
Specific role and situation — enough to picture one real person.
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Loop 02 / Product strategy
The backlog has no order until someone reads it whole.
GitHub issues accumulate in whatever order they were filed — a fact of when something was noticed, not what should get built first. The Roadmap Analyst reads the whole backlog, the actual codebase, and the actual customer at once, then proposes one build order for a human to accept, adjust, or reject.
01 / On-demand, not automatic
This loop doesn't run inside the pipeline. It runs when you ask.
Every other loop on this site fires on its own trigger — a /feature stage completes, or a review verdict passes. /roadmap is different: invoked directly, whenever there's a backlog worth re-reading, on no fixed cadence. It reads three sources at once — every open feature- and tech-debt-labeled GitHub issue, every persona file under docs/icp/, and the codebase itself — and writes docs/roadmap.md for a human to read.
02 / Reading the customer
One file per persona. No blended average.
/define-icp interviews the user to write docs/icp/{persona-slug}-icp.md — and a product can have more than one, a two-sided marketplace's buyer and seller each earning their own file. A backlog item's value gets judged against a specific persona, never an averaged composite.
The job they're hiring this for
What they're trying to accomplish, and what triggers the search.
Today, without this
What they use instead, and specifically why it falls short.
What they value
The reasons they keep choosing this over the alternative.
What makes them leave
The friction or dealbreaker that loses them.
Who this is NOT for
An explicit anti-persona — at least one entry, never "everyone."
Honesty over invention
If docs/icp/ is empty or every file looks stale, the analyst ranks by dependency only and says so plainly — recommending a fresh /define-icp pass rather than fabricating a customer to fill the gap.
03 / The report
One document. Separate verdicts, never a merge.
Every pass writes docs/roadmap.md — a single file with a fixed shape, meant for a human to read and override, not a database to query.
Ranked, with reasons
Clear-and-on-ICP items first, ordered by how directly each serves what a persona names.
Named, not vague
Waiting on a specific dependency — never just "blocked."
Flagged, not closed
A human call, since the persona files themselves might be incomplete.
Surfaced, then confirmed
A genuinely new idea the backlog misses — filed only after the user confirms it live.
Refresh only
What shipped, what's new, what changed order and why.
Never left blank
Assumptions made and where the ranking struggled.
04 / What it never touches
It proposes. It doesn't decide, and it doesn't edit.
Deterministic
Fixed by the report format
gh issue list, filtered by labeldocs/roadmap.md's exact section orderbin/team-create-issuefor any new filing
Probabilistic
Judged by the analyst
- Which persona an item actually serves
- Whether a named dependency truly blocks it
- How directly an item matches What They Value
Never without a human
Read the source documentation
The analyst cannot edit docs/icp/, application code, or any existing GitHub issue. It can file exactly one new issue for a genuinely new gap — and only after the user confirms it in the same conversation, never as an automated pipeline step.