Most product roadmaps are built in a conference room with sticky notes and strong opinions. The loudest voice wins. The roadmap reflects political dynamics, not engineering reality.
Then reality hits. The "2-week feature" takes 2 months because nobody checked the codebase complexity. The "quick integration" requires rewriting the data layer. The "simple UI change" touches a shared component used by 14 other pages.
The Data-Driven Alternative
What if your roadmap was informed by actual codebase data?
Feature Inventory from Code
Instead of asking "what features do we have?" and getting different answers from PM, engineering, and sales — extract features automatically from code analysis. Louvain clustering on the dependency graph produces a definitive feature list with boundaries, complexity metrics, and ownership data.