This kind of work is commonly dismissed as UX theater — and rightly so — but it can certainly feel like research to inexperienced practitioners. After all, the PMs talked to customers, and gathered feedback and feature ideas, which they used to create a roadmap and then a prioritized backlog. What more could you want?

But the features delivered from that backlog will all contribute to the user experience rot, because they build on a premise of solving the product problem of “missing features” rather than the customer problem of not being able to reach their goals.