The “Later” Column Is Deferred Accountability

Open your team's roadmap. Look at the “Later” column. Count the items. Now check when the oldest one was added.

If you're like most teams we've analyzed, there are items in “Later” that have been there for over 400 days. Some over 600. A few have outlived the people who created them.

“Later” isn't a plan. It's where accountability goes to die.

Decisions Without Memory

In Christopher Nolan's Memento, the protagonist can't form new memories. He navigates the world through tattoos, Polaroids, and notes—artifacts that tell him what he's decided without him remembering why. He follows the system even when the system is wrong because the system is all he has.

Engineering organizations operate the same way. The roadmap is the tattoo. The backlog is the Polaroid collection. Teams inherit decisions from people who've left, follow priorities set in contexts that no longer exist, and ship features justified by assumptions nobody can verify.

The Loop

In Looper, temporary fixes shipped today break systems in the future. The protagonist's present-tense decisions create the exact problems his future self is trying to solve.

Engineering teams live this every day. The hotfix that bypasses the API contract. The feature flag that never gets cleaned up. The “temporary” shared database that's still in production three years later with 14 services depending on it.

Each of these starts as a reasonable decision. Each compounds into something that consumes more maintenance capacity than the original feature delivered. This is the Innovation Tax in action—the ratio of liability work to asset work tipping further out of balance with every deferred decision.

Roadmaps Compress Uncertainty Into Optimism

Here's the structural problem: roadmaps are narrative documents disguised as planning tools. They compress genuine uncertainty into a sequence of confident commitments.

“Now” is specific because the work is in flight. “Next” is plausible because the context is fresh. “Later” is fiction—it's an organizational promise that nobody intends to keep, wrapped in a format that suggests intentionality.

The problem isn't that teams defer work. Prioritization requires it. The problem is that “Later” presents deferred accountability as deliberate strategy. It tells the organization that these items are planned when they're actually abandoned.

The Question That Reveals It

“If we could only keep 3 items in 'Later,' which would survive?”

This question does two things. First, it forces a triage that the column has been avoiding. Second, it reveals which items have actual stakeholder commitment versus which are organizational ghosts—decisions made by people who've left, in contexts that no longer exist, for reasons nobody can reconstruct.

The items that can't survive that question are your Context Collapse made visible. They're the point where organizational memory has degraded past the point of usefulness. They're the unreliable narrator's most comfortable hiding spot.

Seeing them is the first step. Measuring how much capacity they silently consume is the second. That's what we do.