Deciding what to do next, writing it down so it survives contact with stakeholders, and holding the line when everything is urgent.
Prioritisation is a strategy problem that arrives disguised as a scheduling argument, which is why a scoring framework on its own rarely settles anything. These books cover the goal setting that makes a decision defensible, the formats for communicating intent to people outside the team, and the practical techniques for slicing and sequencing the work. The list is ordered from the roadmap itself down to the release planning underneath it.
The roadmap as a statement of intent, built from vision, business objectives, themes and loosely expressed time horizons with confidence stated openly. Also the fullest treatment of the stakeholder conversation the format depends on.
Prioritisation arguments are usually a symptom of measuring output, and Perri makes that visible. The Product Kata gives you something to run instead of a ranked feature list.
Seiden's three questions for defining an outcome give you something worth prioritising against. Short, and it removes most of the ambiguity that makes a scoring exercise feel arbitrary.
Adzic's four levels connect every candidate to a goal and to an actor, which turns prioritisation into a question about assumptions rather than about preferences. Also the fastest way to justify what you dropped.
Wodtke on one objective per quarter, a Monday commitment meeting and a Friday demonstration. The weekly cadence is the part that makes a stated priority survive past the second week.
Pichler's Product Vision Board and goal based roadmap connect strategy to a backlog without an intermediate translation layer. Template driven, so you can use it the same day you read it.
Slicing is where prioritisation actually happens, whatever the spreadsheet says. Patton's map lets you cut a release across a whole journey instead of shipping one complete feature nobody can reach yet.
Appetite set as a constraint before the work is shaped, and betting on a cycle rather than committing to a backlog. A genuinely different model, worth understanding even if you keep the one you have.
Cohn on release planning, splitting stories and prioritising on financial grounds. The mechanics underneath a roadmap that has to survive a question about dates.