War-game a feature request triage before the backlog becomes a political list that cannot explain why one ask ships and another stalls.
Triage processes fail when scoring is theater, when sales promises bypass the queue, when "customer requested" hides a single loud account, and when engineering capacity is assumed rather than reserved. A neat intake form is not evidence that the next quarter of asks will survive a careful and hostile read.
Freeze the process
State the intake path, scoring criteria, who can override, the publish cadence for decisions, and the kill criteria for asks that stay open forever. Attach the draft rubric, sample tickets, capacity math, and the last quarter of ship-or-decline decisions. If triage mixes bugs, enterprise exceptions, and net-new bets without separate lanes, split them. A war game needs one move under fire at a time.
Write the decision you will make if the war game finds nothing new. Also write the delay criteria if capacity or scoring still lacks a named owner.
Seats that matter
- PM. Where scoring invites gaming or hides tradeoffs from the roadmap.
- Engineering. Where estimates, dependencies, and opportunity cost are soft.
- Sales or CS. Where promises still leave the queue and become commitments.
- Customer seat. Why a declined ask still looks arbitrary after the written rationale.
- Skeptic. The claim that looks strongest and is least evidenced by past triage.
Attach the same source pack to every seat. Secret fast tracks for favorite accounts only create fake calm.
Loop the review
Feed Pingpong the rubric, sample asks, and capacity notes. First pass steelmans the process. Later passes attack from PM, eng, sales, and customer seats. Final pass turns surviving objections into clearer lanes, publish rules, or a hold. Agreement across passes is not proof. Keep the objections that still have evidence gaps.
Force a month-after narrative: what happens if a large account escalates a decline, if sales quotes a feature still in triage, or if engineering invents quiet side quests. If those stories are stronger than your mitigation plan, fix the package before you trust the backlog. When the process announces a new scoring rule, force PM and customer seats to invent the FAQ you will need within a week of publish. If you cannot answer with the same facts as the rubric, the package is not ready.
Pair with war-game a roadmap cut, war-game a roadmap reveal, pretend you are the CPO, pretend you are the largest customer, and the war-game decisions hub. See how to run a Pingpong.