When facing constrains from finance/budget, how do you balance product delivery/growth and lack of resource

Question

Aleks Bass · Accepted Answer

Ruthless prioritization. Many organizations are trying to do too many things given the capacity of their teams. I'd rather focus on fewer things that are likely to have a bigger impact than trying to accomplish a larger number of them less well and with less impact to the business and the customer experience.

Ingo Wiegand · Answer

* I generally like to break product problems into smaller, independent pieces to help me more effectively prioritize and isolate critical ‘must do’ work
 * One potential way to approach a problem decomposition like this is to think of three distinct categories of feature work:
   a) items that are crucial to achieve your overall product goals (clear ‘must do’)
   b) ‘critical path’ dependencies that can block success/completion and
   c) things that are nice-to-have or could benefit from additional trade-off discussions (these are usually where you will gain most flexibility in terms of resourcing).
 * Initially, all work (incl. potential ‘must do’ items) will benefit from going through a first order trade-off discussion to ensure criticality.
 * I’ve found the following key questions to be a useful starter set to kickstart these types of conversations:
    * Where can features be de-scoped to allow for growth/product delivery in increments within budget?
    * Where can features be sequenced in a way that hypotheses can be tested at a smaller scale, without needing much larger engineering investments?
    * What alternative solutions have been considered and is the proposed feature/work the most efficient from an engineering perspective?
    * What are the biggest risks that need to be mitigated (the associated work might turn into ‘must do’ items)?
    * Where can you ensure progress without too many ‘one-way doors’ that might limit opportunity/flexibility later?
    * What are the key skillsets needed and does your team have those readily available today?

* Once you have a better understanding of answers to these question, it becomes easier to stac

Mike Flouton · Answer

The biggest mistake companies make is treating product management a junior, technical function. A good PM is a strategic thinker who is market oriented. A big part in making that transition to the strategic is learning to speak in terms of business outcomes, and learning how to sell internally.

If you’re not getting the resources you need, put together a model for the business benefit you could drive with more resources. Don’t talk about story points, or feature velocity, or any of that. Executives and finance people don’t understand it and don’t care. Talk about revenue growth acceleration or COGS reduction. Put specific numbers to your proposals. Your numbers will be wrong. That’s ok, forecasting is hard. But putting a line in the sand gives you a place to begin the debate. And that debate is going to go a lot better if your executive team sees you as a strategic collaborator rather than as an out of touch techie who doesn’t understand the business.

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