Ever since seeing WoW talent trees* in high school i've been obsessed with RPG skill trees as a way to represent information as I've thought they convey 1) Ordering, 2) Progression and 3) Contingent Requirements really well. Not only do they help give better visual structure of whats happening and what will happen - they also give people a feeling of movement, progression and hope (whereas kanban boards and issue trackers give people the feeling of dread).

This isn't surprising as video games were really designed to make people excited to play on and reach the next milestone.

Turns out this format is really fun for people and agents to think about their products! As an experiment I also hooked up an MCP to one of my product roadmaps and it was able to map out my current codebase to a kanmap, and then suggest realistic next ideas to make. I've even got an agent now working on the next node of a kanmap.

* Kanmaps was inspired not just by WOW talent trees, but also by the Age of Empires Tech Trees, and FFX ability spheres setup. Also huge shoutout to a bank in Australia called Up who did something called the Tree of Up as a product roadmap like a video game for their banking product - their work definitely inspired things in Kanmaps too.