Objective Tagging: Core vs Context

When Geoffrey Moore followed Crossing the Chasm with Dealing with Darwin (2005) he shifted the spotlight from market adoption curves to innovation allocation inside mature tech firms. His blunt message: Differentiate or die. The twist was how he framed the fight—not as big vs small, fast vs slow, but Core vs Context:

• Core work directly creates sustainable competitive advantage.
• Context work must be done to stay in business but cannot create differentiation.

Product managers who tag backlog items through this lens find an unexpected dividend: clarity that survives the CFO’s spreadsheet and the CTO’s technical nuance. RoadmapOne turns that clarity into living dashboards, so leadership can see—in real time—how much of next quarter’s burn actually earns tomorrow’s moat.

The Birth of Core and Context

Moore observed that as companies scale, their backlog fills with operational necessities: legacy migrations, regulatory tweaks, scalability refactors. These “good citizenship” duties secretly devour the very resources meant to fuel the next wave of Core innovation. By naming the categories, he offered executives a language to defend daring bets against the tyranny of daily chores.

Defining Core in a SaaS World

Three Tests of Core

1. Differentiation Test
   Would a customer pay a premium solely because of this capability?
2. Competitive Distance Test
   If we execute flawlessly, do rivals need years to catch up?
3. Valuation Test
   Does the investment narrative hinge on this area?

Fail any test and the work is Context—important but not a moat.

Examples

Context Is Not Optional—But It Is Outsourceable

Context spans:

• Infrastructure plumbing (CI/CD, observability stack)
• Compliance upgrades (GDPR, PCI-DSS)
• Back-office tools (billing portals, CRM integrations)

Moore’s guidance: Ruthlessly minimise, automate, or outsource context. Free A-players for Core breakthroughs. Tagging makes the hidden load visible, enabling a fact-based conversation about outsourcing budgets versus roadmap slippage.

Tagging Mechanics in RoadmapOne

1. Create an Exclusive Tag Group: Core, Context.
2. Default to Context: The onus is on the epic owner to justify Core status.
3. Dashboard: A stacked bar per quarter shows capacity split; thresholds alert if Core dips below, say, 25 %.
4. Drill-Down: Click the Context bar to see vendor-fit scores and outsourcing candidates.

Case Study: “FinSight” Analytics Platform

2019–2021: 70 % of engineering hours disappeared into Kafka scaling, Terraform rewrites, and ISO 27001 paperwork—Context disguised as “strategic tech debt.”
2022 Action: Introduced Core/Context tagging. Resulting heat-map horrified the board: only 18 % Core. They approved a £600 k DevOps outsourcing contract; six months later Core investment rose to 42 % and FinSight’s ML forecasting module (true Core) launched a year earlier than re-plan.

Avoiding Anti-Patterns

• “Everything is Core” Inflation – Enforce the valuation test; if investors won’t pay a premium, it’s Context.
• Starving Context – Over-outsourcing can erode quality. Keep architectural oversight in-house.
• Periodic Amnesia – Core today can become Context tomorrow. Schedule annual tag audits.

Linking to Other Frameworks

Core aligns naturally with Run-Grow-Transform (usually Grow / Transform) and with Innovation Ambition Matrix (Adjacency + Transformational). Context often maps to Run or Core-70 % bucket. Overlapping tag views in RoadmapOne reveal when “Context Creep” suffocates ambition.

Talking to the Board

“Only 28 % of Q4 capacity is Core. At that rate our AI road-map slips a year, costing £8 m ARR. Outsourcing Context for £1.2 m buys the year back.”

The math writes itself because tags quantify the drag.

Key Takeaways

• Core wins markets; Context merely sustains them.
• Tagging lays bare hidden Context spend, arming leaders to outsource rationally.
• RoadmapOne’s live dashboards turn Moore’s philosophy into operational telemetry.