Roadmap prioritisation you can defend

Here's my backlog: {{list items with any context you have}}. Our goal this quarter: {{goal}}. Team capacity: {{people and weeks}}.

1. For each item, state the outcome it's supposed to produce and which part of the goal it serves. Anything that serves no stated goal goes in a separate list.
2. Classify: does this grow the business, keep it alive (reliability, compliance, debt), or reduce future cost? Show the mix — if it's all growth, say why that's a problem.
3. Estimate value and effort in ranges, and name the item whose estimate you least trust.
4. Find the dependencies and the items that unlock others.
5. Propose the quarter's plan within capacity, with 20% unallocated. State what's explicitly not happening and what we'll tell the people who asked for it.
6. Identify the one item that would be embarrassing to skip and defend the decision anyway.
7. Give the mid-quarter checkpoint: what result would make us re-plan.

Don't use RICE scores as an argument. Reason it out.