The Dual-Track Roadmap
How to Move Fast Without Losing Trust
The old tech mantra was “move fast and break things,” but purpose and value-driven teams know that breaking trust is a cost you can't afford. The alternative isn't to move slow; it's to build smarter.
Too often, participatory research gets framed as a ‘nice-to-have’ – something you can layer on after the “real” work is moving. I’ve fought that tension more times than I can count. The pressure is always to privilege speed, to show momentum. But speed without authenticity isn’t progress, it’s theatre.
That’s why resilient teams reject the false choice between scale and integrity. They design systems where speed and authenticity reinforce each other.
That’s the power of a dual-track roadmap: building and earning trust in parallel.
You’re always running both:
Track 1: Build. This is your product or service track. Ship a sharp MVP scope, get it into people’s hands. The point isn’t polish, it’s proof.
Track 2: Learn. This is your trust track. You actively engage traditional rights holders and stakeholders, surface real-world needs, and test your assumptions about governance and impact. The goal isn’t performative feedback; it’s genuine alignment.
The trap most teams fall into is treating these tracks as separate. But if your “learn” track doesn’t change your “build” priorities, it’s just research theatre. And if your build track ignores what you’ve learned, you’re building on sand.
The connective tissue (the checkpoints where learning actually shifts decision) is where the trust lives. That’s also the part people tend to rewrite later, as if integration was always obvious. But it rarely is. It sticks because someone kept holding the line when it wasn’t easy or popular.
Checklist for Leaders
Defining Your Tracks
- Build: What’s the leanest MVP we can ship in the next few months? What’s off the table, no matter what?
- Learn: What questions about trust, behaviour, or legitimacy need answering right now? Who’s missing from our inputs?
- Integration: Where do learnings actually change priorities? What’s our standing ritual for surfacing them? How do we close the loop so the community sees their fingerprints?
This is how you move fast without burning trust. Build the thing, and build the legitimacy of the thing, at the same time. If nobody’s holding the line on that second track, it probably doesn’t exist.
Editor’s Note: This piece was drafted in [Month Year] and added here as part of my archives.