Product note
Layered roadmap prioritization in Vibe
How I sequence core value, safety, operations, and monetization.
A roadmap becomes useful when it expresses dependency and value, not when it contains every good idea. For Vibe, reviews and business profiles were the core layer because no other feature mattered without credible local information.
Trust and operations came next: identity, claims, support, moderation, and admin visibility. These systems protect the core loop and make public launch governable. Growth tools and richer discovery can then compound a system that is already usable and manageable.
Packages came last. Until the free product made its value visible, pricing would have been a guess about a product that did not yet exist. Layering prevented us from selling features before understanding what businesses would actually value.