Week 6 Milestone: Participatory Roadmap and Product

Product: Rooted

Team members: Ruba Ahmed, Brooke Ballhaus, Genc Saracaydin, Renn Su, Shirley Zhang

Links

• Prototype (MVP): https://project-v6as2.vercel.app/signin 
  • Main page: https://project-v6as2.vercel.app/
  • Settings page: https://project-v6as2.vercel.app/settings 
  • Help page: https://project-v6as2.vercel.app/help 
• Participatory roadmap board (Miro): https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVEUKwMis=/ 
• Session deck (Google Drive): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ffSt7nv2oirfcSs1MNwOf7JGIumfsABoOaRCELtrH7Y/edit?usp=sharing 

We ran 13 participatory roadmap sessions across the five of us. In each session the participant placed 15 candidate features on a participatory roadmap. Overall, our participants included product managers, TPMs, and PM/SWE startup interns.

Features

• Slack context pull: Connect Slack and Rooted pulls in the threads that matter to your decision, so you never paste context again.
• Frame a decision: Write down the decision you are facing, with notes, deadlines and constraints.
• Co-created evidence brief: Gathers sources and related past decisions. The user corrects what it got wrong and sees what is missing.
• Option branches (alternate futures): See 2 to 4 possible paths side by side, each with tradeoffs and a rough score.
• Rationale chat: Talk through the options with an AI that pushes back and tells you how confident it is.
• One-step decision log: Save the choice, your reasoning and the options you rejected in one click.
• Search past decisions: Ask why did we pick X and get the decision, the reasoning and who was involved.
• Outcome check-ins: A reminder at 30, 60 or 90 days asks what actually happened after the decision.
• Meeting transcripts: Pull decisions and context from Granola or Fireflies meeting notes.
• Docs and email connectors: Add Google Docs, Notion, Gmail and Calendar as context sources.
• Stakeholder map: See who a decision affects, who has to sign off and what other decisions it depends on.
• Weekly open-decision digest: A Monday summary of the decisions still waiting on you, sorted by urgency.
• Meeting prep brief: Before each meeting, a brief on the decisions likely to come up and the background on each.
• Decision spotter: Rooted finds decisions hiding in PRDs and Slack threads and offers to log them for you.
• Decision patterns: See which decisions get reversed, how long calls take and which debates keep coming back.

Results

The chart shows how many of the 13 roadmaps placed each feature in each tier, sorted from most urgent to least. 

What we learned

• Frame a decision and One-step decision log were the most common Soon picks (6 of 13 roadmaps each), which points to the core capture loop as the first thing to build.
• Slack context pull, Co-created evidence brief, and Stakeholder map had the lowest average tier (2.00), so they are the next tier of priorities.
• Search past decisions was the most consistent Later pick (8 of 13).
• Meeting prep brief (9 of 13), Outcome check-ins (8), and Weekly open-decision digest (8 of 12) were mostly Much Later. The digest had the highest average tier (3.17) and was never placed Soon.
• Option branches and One-step decision log were the most polarizing: each was placed Soon by 4 or more participants and Outside by 3.