Most roadmaps begin with a solution someone already believes in. We begin somewhere harder and more useful: with the customer's real problem, read from their own signals, before a single feature is designed.

This is what working backwards means. You start at the customer and move back toward the build, never the reverse. The roadmap, the team, the delivery, all of it follows from a problem you have genuinely understood, not one you assumed. Reading the customer's signals is not a step before the method. It is where the method begins.