How do product teams decide what not to build?

One thing I noticed while working as a founding engineer at two YC-backed startups was that product decisions were rarely documented in one place.

Customer requests came through Slack, support tickets, sales calls, and interviews. Every time a new request appeared, the team had to mentally process the same questions:

• Is this a real customer problem or just a symptom?

• Are we hearing a solution or understanding the root cause?

• Are we building a real solution or just adding a band-aid feature?

• Does this help one customer or many?

Most of that reasoning lived in someone’s head or scattered across tools.

Over time this leads to roadmap drift, repeated debates, and lost context.

So I started building Alera, a Decision Intelligence platform for product teams.

Instead of turning feedback into tasks immediately, it helps teams structure the reasoning behind product decisions and connect feedback, strategy, and execution.

We just launched on Product Hunt and would love to hear how other teams handle this today.

Curious: how does your team decide what not to build?

Post: https://www.producthunt.com/products/alera