Limit initiative selection to 1 for roadmap clarity

What is the challenge?

We have a complex product portfolio and like to produce a roadmap view that shows releases attached to initiatives. The problem here is that we end up with a very tangled roadmap with releases or features flowing into multiple initiatives, often across product lines. Usually this happens not because the product manager has carefully coordinated solutions that maximize value across multiple initiatives, but rather because the product manager is overzealous and wants to attach their release or feature to every single initiative across the portfolio that on the surface sounds like it could benefit, "just in case!". With a large team, it doesn't matter how may times you train or reinforce the practice you want (only 1 initiative attached to any other record, please!), if the option is there they will use it. I don't want to create a custom field to solve this problem because I want all of the other functionality available within initiatives.

What is the impact?

The impact is the initiative/release or initiative/feature roadmap out of the box is a mess and completely unreadable. This leads to extra time by me, head of product, to refine the roadmaps and clean them up every quarter when we ship and present them to stakeholders. It takes me about 24 hours a quarter to perform this task. The other impact is that product managers waste time and inefficiently produce their roadmaps, leading them to each burn 2 hours each roadmap cycle on throwaway work.

Describe your idea

Have a config option that allows the admin to set a ceiling on the number of goals and initiatives that can be "attached" to a release or feature. In particular, this will benefit large portfolios with many product managers working in separate product lines.