“Not now” is too vague for product decisions
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I’ve started treating “not now” as three different decisions:
The evidence is too weak.
The problem matters, but the timing is wrong.
The idea conflicts with a choice already made.
They look identical in a backlog, but they deserve different revisits. The first needs research, the second a trigger date, and the third a deliberate re-open of the earlier trade-off.
How do you record deferred product decisions so future you can tell whether to investigate, schedule, or leave them closed?
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this framing is better than what i had. i've been logging deferred decisions with the constraint attached, but not sorting them by why they're deferred, and those three really do need different revisits.
i hit your third category yesterday. someone pointed out a real gap in my app, and my honest answer was "you're right, and it conflicts with a choice i already made." not weak evidence, not bad timing, just a genuine tradeoff i'd locked in earlier. logging that as "not now" would've been useless to future me, because future me would reopen it as if it were an evidence problem.
so what i'm stealing from you: record which of the three it is. the third one especially, because reopening it means reopening the original trade-off, and that deserves a deliberate decision, not a backlog groom.