I agree with the sentiments but there are a number of things that make this hard, some already alluded to.
The idea that something we "need" but maybe not in the top 5 and it seems weird to deal with it with "bring it back to each meeting until either you don't want it anymore or it becomes top 5", why not instead put it into the roadmap?
Someone else has alluded to external investment driven by strategy and long-term plans. It is uncomfortable if there is no long-term plan even though we are told that investors invest in the people, not the product.
Some tasks are long-term and might involve communication with customers, deadlines to deprecate something, other work needed to support something. If all of this will take 1 year in elapsed time, you can't simply forget the later bits since the earlier bits are only being done to support the later bits.
Because then there will be 100 things on the roadmap, 20 of which have a sponsor that have long since left the company.
In an ideal world, yes, everything would go on the roadmap which would automatically take into account the market appetite and internal economy and sort things so the most important thing is first.
In reality, trying to intelligently prioritise among hundreds of things takes a huge amount of work -- time we could instead spend on doing the real work of development. In other words, it's a trade-off: do you want to spend time shuffling Jira tickets around, or actually implementing them?
Having people bring up their top priorities repeatedly ensures that the only tasks under consideration are ones that people think are important right now, not ones that were important at some point some time ago. And we get that filtering for free!
The idea that something we "need" but maybe not in the top 5 and it seems weird to deal with it with "bring it back to each meeting until either you don't want it anymore or it becomes top 5", why not instead put it into the roadmap?
Someone else has alluded to external investment driven by strategy and long-term plans. It is uncomfortable if there is no long-term plan even though we are told that investors invest in the people, not the product.
Some tasks are long-term and might involve communication with customers, deadlines to deprecate something, other work needed to support something. If all of this will take 1 year in elapsed time, you can't simply forget the later bits since the earlier bits are only being done to support the later bits.