Annual planning season is upon us. For product managers and product leaders across B2B SaaS companies, this means one thing: it's time to step back from day-to-day execution and craft an aspirational product roadmap for 2026. Yet despite the best intentions, many teams struggle to deliver strategic, needle-moving roadmaps that excite leadership and drive meaningful business impact.

The challenge isn't lack of effort. Product teams are working harder than ever, conducting stakeholder interviews, analyzing customer feedback, and running prioritization frameworks. But something fundamental is missing. According to Sachin Rekhi, CEO of NoteJoy and former product leader at LinkedIn Sales Navigator, the culprit is often the very frameworks we rely on.

"Most of the roadmaps I see from teams are largely incremental," Rekhi observes. "Product leaders wish they would be putting together bolder, more ambitious roadmaps." The disconnect between what leadership expects and what teams deliver stems from a systemic issue: traditional prioritization frameworks like RICE are fundamentally divorced from strategy, inherently bias teams toward low-risk work, and create a false sense of rigor.

Rekhi has developed an alternative approach that he's successfully deployed at scale. His framework uses four distinct strategic lenses to help product teams build balanced roadmaps that connect directly to business metrics, customer needs, strategic differentiation, and long-term vision. Here's how it works and why it matters for your annual planning process. (Or watch him explain it live in our recent webinar "Annual Planning and the Art of Roadmapping.")

The Problem with Traditional Roadmap Prioritization

Before we dive into the solution, let's diagnose the problem. Product leaders consistently report three major challenges when reviewing annual plans from their teams:

1. Roadmaps lack ambition. Teams present incremental improvements rather than bold bets that could fundamentally move the needle for the business. The initiatives feel safe rather than transformative.
2. Strategy is missing. Leaders see a list of features but struggle to understand the strategic rationale behind them. There's no clear connection to how these initiatives advance the company's competitive position or fulfill its value proposition.
3. Prioritization rationale is unclear. When teams present their prioritized initiatives, leadership can't discern why certain items made the cut while others didn't. The decision-making process remains opaque.

These issues often trace back to how teams approach prioritization in the first place. Many product teams rely on scoring frameworks like RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) to rank initiatives mathematically. On the surface, this seems logical: assign numerical scores to each dimension, calculate a final score, and prioritize the highest-ranked items.

Why RICE Prioritization Falls Short

The RICE framework asks teams to score each initiative along four dimensions. Reach measures how many people the initiative will affect. Impact assesses the magnitude of effect on key metrics. Confidence captures uncertainty in the estimates. Effort quantifies the resources required, typically in person-months.

The formula is straightforward: (Reach × Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort = RICE Score. Teams then rank initiatives by their scores and work down the list.

While this brings some structure to prioritization discussions, Rekhi identifies three fundamental flaws:

• RICE is divorced from strategy. The framework evaluates initiatives purely on potential impact versus effort. It says nothing about whether an initiative advances your product strategy, strengthens your competitive differentiation, or moves you closer to your vision. You can implement high-RICE-score features all year and still drift further from your strategic goals.
• RICE prioritizes incremental work. The mathematical nature of the framework creates a bias toward low-hanging fruit. Consider an initiative with 100% confidence and 10% effort but only modest impact. It will score higher than a potentially transformative initiative with high impact but also high uncertainty and significant effort investment. As Rekhi notes, "These potential needle-moving initiatives often get deprioritized because of the scoring framework."
• RICE creates false rigor. Multiplying estimates together produces a precise-looking number, but the quality of that number entirely depends on the quality of the underlying estimates. In practice, teams are guessing at reach, impact, and confidence scores. When you multiply rough estimates together, you don't get precision—you get precisely calculated guesswork.

The result is roadmaps that feel mechanical rather than strategic, incremental rather than bold, and disconnected from what actually matters for the business.

A Strategic Alternative: The 4D Methodology

Rekhi's approach fundamentally reorients how teams think about roadmap planning. Instead of starting with a list of potential features and scoring them, teams start by understanding what metrics they need to move and then use four distinct lenses to brainstorm initiatives that could move those metrics.

The framework has two core components:

1. Identify target metrics — Determine which key performance indicators (KPIs) matter most for your business in the coming year
2. Apply four strategic lenses — Use four different perspectives to generate and evaluate potential initiatives

Let's break down each component.

Start with Metrics That Matter

Effective roadmap planning begins with clarity about what you're trying to accomplish. Rekhi advocates building a deep understanding of your metrics hierarchy, starting with outcome metrics like acquisition, engagement, and monetization, then breaking these down into their constituent input metrics.

The key is identifying which input metrics are true levers—the KPIs that, when moved, have the biggest impact on your outcome metrics. Not all input metrics matter equally. Through analysis and experimentation, you discover which ones are the real drivers of business performance.

Rekhi shares an example from his time at LinkedIn Sales Navigator. The team tracked numerous engagement metrics, but over time discovered that search queries were the highest-correlation predictor of long-term retention. Sales Navigator helps sales professionals find prospects, and search was their primary discovery mechanism. The more they searched, the more value they extracted, and the more likely they were to renew their subscriptions.

"As they used more search, the more retained they were in the product," Rekhi explains. This insight transformed how the team thought about priorities. Instead of optimizing a dozen different engagement metrics, they could focus ruthlessly on improving the search experience.

Once you understand your KPI drivers, annual planning becomes an exercise in deciding which metrics to prioritize for the coming year based on where you are in your business lifecycle. An early-stage product might focus entirely on retention and NPS, ensuring the core experience works well. A more mature product might shift focus to acquisition or monetization.

The critical insight is that your roadmap exists to move specific, identified metrics. Every initiative you prioritize should connect clearly to at least one target KPI.

The Four Lenses: Strategy, Vision, Customer, and Business

With target metrics established, you're ready to brainstorm initiatives. This is where Rekhi's four lenses come into play. Rather than generating a random list of possible features, you systematically examine your product through four distinct perspectives:

Strategy Lens — What initiatives align with our product strategy and competitive positioning?

Vision Lens — What initiatives move us closer to realizing our long-term vision?

Customer Lens — What initiatives address what customers have explicitly requested?

Business Lens — What initiatives directly improve critical input metrics?

Each lens serves a specific purpose and generates different types of initiatives. The magic happens when you balance across all four lenses to create a comprehensive roadmap.

Deep Dive: The Four Strategic Lenses

The Strategy Lens: Advancing Your Product Strategy

The strategy lens asks: what initiatives will advance our product strategy? To use this lens effectively, you first need a clearly articulated strategy.

Rekhi defines product strategy as a concrete deliverable addressing six dimensions: target audience (who is your ideal customer), problem (what acute challenge do they face), value proposition (how do you solve it uniquely), strategic differentiation (why will you win long-term), channel strategy (how do you acquire customers), and monetization strategy (how do you generate profitable revenue).

With strategy defined, you can ask strategic brainstorming questions during roadmap planning. If you're serving your current audience well, what adjacent audience should you expand to next? How can you better fulfill your value proposition? What would strengthen your competitive moat?

Rekhi shares a powerful example from LinkedIn Sales Navigator. The product's value proposition included "targeting the right buyer." Customers used advanced search filters to find prospects matching their ideal customer profile. When gathering feedback, customers constantly requested more filters—a zip code filter, industry sub-category filters, and so on.

Applying the customer lens alone would have led the team to simply build more filters. But when they applied the strategy lens and asked how they could better fulfill the "targeting the right buyer" value proposition, they had a breakthrough insight: search itself was friction. What if they could recommend prospects automatically?

This led to building a machine learning system that analyzed which leads salespeople had successfully converted and used lookalike modeling to surface similar prospects at other companies. The recommendation engine removed the need for search entirely while better fulfilling the core value proposition.

"We were using that strategy lens to think beyond what customers were asking for and ask ourselves, if we're really trying to solve for this value proposition, what else could we be doing in a bigger, more impactful way," Rekhi notes.

The Vision Lens: Progress Toward Your Long-Term Vision

The vision lens asks: what initiatives move us toward our long-term vision? But to use this lens, you need more than a vision statement—you need a vision narrative.

Vision statements tend to be short, pithy, and too high-level to generate actionable initiatives. Vision narratives are one-to-two-page documents that describe your future state in detail. The best vision narratives are aspirational, detailed, opinionated, and user-centric.

Rekhi points to Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin as an exemplar. Bezos didn't just say "we'll enable humans to live in space." He detailed a vision of O'Neill colonies—mile-long rotating cylinders that recreate gravity, filled with ecosystems, communities, and beautiful landscapes. He showed detailed mockups. It's specific, opinionated (notably different from Elon Musk's Mars colonization vision), and paints a vivid picture of the user experience.

With a detailed vision narrative, you can identify components that could be built now. Figma provides an excellent example. Their vision was always collaborative design—but not just designers collaborating with other designers. They envisioned product managers, engineers, marketers, and other stakeholders actively creating in the design process, not just commenting.

When Figma achieved dominant market share among designers, they realized they still weren't fulfilling their vision. Designers created in Figma, but other stakeholders mostly left comments. The tool was too technical for non-designers to feel comfortable creating.

This insight led Figma to dedicate resources to FigJam, an online whiteboarding tool specifically designed so anyone could create easily. "What they ultimately said one year was, look, Figma is doing pretty well, but we still have this vision. Let's go take 15 to 20% of our resources and start building this new product FigJam to get us closer to realizing our ultimate vision," Rekhi explains.

The vision lens enables big, bold bets that transform your product category rather than just improving your existing offering.

The Customer Lens: Responding to Customer Feedback

The customer lens asks: what have users explicitly requested? This is the most straightforward lens—customers tell you what they want, and you build it. Yet teams often struggle to apply this lens effectively.

The challenge is bias. Recency bias leads teams to overweight feedback from last week while ignoring patterns from the full year. Loudest voice syndrome causes teams to prioritize demands from a vocal customer over broader but quieter needs that affect more users.

Modern customer feedback platforms solve this problem. Tools aggregate feedback from multiple sources—app store reviews, G2 comments, customer support tickets from Zendesk, sales call transcripts from Gong—and use AI to identify themes, categorize requests, and show trends over time.

Rekhi specifically highlights Productboard Pulse as an example of this category. These tools help teams see which requests have the highest volume and impact without being skewed by recency or noise.

Of course, you shouldn't simply implement requests in order of popularity. An item might be highly requested but come from users outside your target ICP, or it might not align with your strategic direction. But having a systematic view of customer needs is essential for avoiding the incremental trap while still meeting customer expectations.

The Business Lens: Optimizing Key Metrics

The business lens asks: what mechanical improvements will move our target KPIs? This lens generates initiatives that are almost mathematical in their focus on metric movement.

These tend to be growth initiatives: conversion optimization across pricing pages and onboarding flows, awareness campaigns to drive feature discovery, retention mechanics to reduce churn. The Slack growth team exemplifies this approach.

Slack tested countless messages to drive free-to-paid conversion. They experimented with in-product banners, personalized emails to admins, and various value propositions. Through systematic testing, they discovered that FOMO-based messaging worked best—specifically, messaging that highlighted the loss of searchability once you exceeded the 10,000-message limit on free accounts.

This is the business lens in action: systematically testing improvements to move a specific metric. It's less about building new features and more about optimizing the efficiency of what already exists.

Bringing It All Together: Building Balanced Roadmaps

With your target metrics defined and initiatives brainstormed through all four lenses, you're ready to make prioritization decisions. The process is straightforward:

1. For each lens, identify which brainstormed initiatives would meaningfully move your target KPIs
2. Prioritize one to two initiatives from each lens that have the highest potential impact
3. Ensure you're achieving balance across lenses (though not every lens needs representation every quarter)
4. Bundle related initiatives into objectives and define key results that measure success
5. Annotate your roadmap with the rationale for each prioritization decision

This final step—roadmap explainability—is crucial. When you present your roadmap, you can now say: "We prioritized Initiative A because it fills a critical product gap that advances our differentiation strategy. We prioritized Initiative B because it unlocks a key component of our long-term vision. Initiative C addresses our most-requested customer feature. And Initiative D will directly move our top engagement KPI."

Leadership now understands not just what you're building, but why. The roadmap feels strategic because it is strategic—built on a foundation of clear metrics, comprehensive brainstorming, and deliberate prioritization across multiple dimensions.

Practical Implementation: Making This Work

As with any framework, successful implementation requires attention to execution details.

Involve engineering early. Once you've brainstormed initiatives across the four lenses, bring in engineering leadership to provide high-level effort estimates. You don't need detailed specifications at this stage—t-shirt sizes (small, medium, large) are sufficient to understand what's realistic to commit to.

Get stakeholder alignment proactively. If you're in a larger organization with dependencies on other teams, start the planning process early in Q4. Share draft roadmaps with partner teams to ensure you're aligning on similar objectives before finalizing plans.

Make your roadmap operational. Don't let your annual plan become a document you create once and forget. Tools like Productboard's strategic hierarchy enable you to track objectives, key results, and associated initiatives throughout the quarter. Review progress regularly and hold quarterly retrospectives to assess what worked, what moved the needle, and what needs adjustment.

Iterate your strategy and vision. Annual planning isn't just about the roadmap—it's an opportunity to revisit your product strategy and vision. As you learn what's working and what's not, update these foundational documents to reflect your evolved understanding.

Balance doesn't mean equal distribution. You don't need initiatives from all four lenses every quarter. Sometimes you'll spend months focused purely on customer and business lens work while ignoring strategy and vision initiatives. That's appropriate if you've just launched a major new product and need to fix usability issues and improve retention. The key is not staying in that mode so long that you starve the strategic lenses indefinitely.

Key Takeaways for Your Annual Planning Process

As you embark on your annual planning for 2026, keep these principles in mind:

Start with metrics, not features. Identify the 3-5 KPIs that matter most for your business right now. Every initiative should connect to moving at least one of these metrics.

Think beyond customer requests. The customer lens is important, but it shouldn't be your only lens. Balance customer demands with strategic initiatives, vision bets, and business optimizations.

Make risk an explicit trade-off. Traditional scoring frameworks hide risk aversion in their mathematics. The four lenses approach makes it explicit: you're deliberately choosing to balance low-risk incremental work with high-risk, high-reward strategic bets.

Explain your prioritization. Annotate your roadmap with the "why" behind each decision. This transforms your roadmap from a feature list into a strategic document that builds confidence with stakeholders.

Balance your portfolio. Over the course of a year, ensure you're investing across all four lenses. Too much focus on any single lens—whether customer, business, strategy, or vision—will eventually create problems.

Annual planning is your opportunity to step back from execution and think strategically about where your product needs to go. The four lenses framework gives you a structured approach to do exactly that—building roadmaps that are bold, strategic, and directly connected to business outcomes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How does the 4D methodology differ from RICE prioritization?

The fundamental difference is that RICE evaluates initiatives in isolation based on impact versus effort, while the four lenses framework evaluates initiatives based on how they advance your strategy, vision, customer relationships, and business metrics. RICE is divorced from strategy; the four lenses framework puts strategy at the center.

Q: When should I lean more into product vision versus product strategy?

Use the strategy lens to identify initiatives that advance your current competitive positioning and value proposition. Use the vision lens to identify transformative bets that could unlock entirely new capabilities or markets. Strategy is about winning now; vision is about positioning for the future.

Q: How do I balance quick wins with long-term bets?

Use the customer and business lenses to identify quick wins that build credibility and maintain customer satisfaction. Use the strategy and vision lenses to identify long-term bets. The right balance depends on your product's maturity—new products need more focus on quick wins to prove the core experience works, while mature products can dedicate more resources to strategic and visionary initiatives.

Q: Can I use this framework for quarterly planning instead of annual planning?

Absolutely. The framework works at any time horizon. For quarterly planning, you might focus more heavily on the customer and business lenses with occasional strategic initiatives, while annual planning gives you space to consider bigger vision bets.

Q: How do I get buy-in from leadership on this approach?

Start by sharing the limitations of current prioritization methods and the three challenges leaders typically identify: lack of ambition, missing strategy, and unclear rationale. Then show how the four lenses framework specifically addresses each challenge. Most leaders will recognize these pain points immediately and appreciate a more strategic approach.

Take Your Annual Planning to the Next Level

Ready to transform your roadmap planning process? Start by defining your target metrics for 2026. Then work through each of the four lenses systematically, brainstorming initiatives that could move those metrics while balancing customer needs, business optimization, strategic advancement, and visionary bets.

Want to see this framework in action? Watch the full webinar with Sachin Rekhi where he dives even deeper into practical examples from LinkedIn Sales Navigator and answers common roadmapping questions.

If you're looking for tools to help operationalize this approach, explore how Productboard can help you aggregate customer feedback, track OKRs, and maintain a strategic roadmap throughout the year.