Product teams' real workload splits into three buckets: new value (net-new bets), existing value (improving what already ships), and protect value (compliance, security, and tech debt). The third bucket is chronically underestimated and hidden from stakeholders during a transformation, because it produces no visible feature and is easy to defer — until dependencies and unaddressed tech debt become "the root of all evil" for delivery slowness, undermining a transformation's ability to show results even when discovery itself is going well. Hiding this bucket is one of the Product-Model Transformation Anti-Patterns (Taxonomy): a transformation that only reports on new-value work looks fast until protect-value debt catches up with it.
Strategy is commonly misunderstood as only being about 'what's next' — new bets and new territory. The The Decision Stack (Eriksson) view argues it must also explicitly address maintaining what already exists: protecting current revenue and the current customer base is itself a strategic choice, not a default that happens automatically while attention goes to new bets.