Can you walk me through your process for prioritizing product features and making decisions on what to develop?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

I typically look at impact metrics, complexity and cost of development and get
agreement with Product Management and Users

We recently expanded our resource planning system. As new organizations came
onboard we got requests for several new features. 
My framework to handle new feature request includes the following:
- evaluation if the feature is needed and if there is a viable workaround
    That tends to satisfy about 10-15% of requests.
    In recent example of resource planning system maybe 30% of requests were
covered by existing functionality
- evaluation of impact:
    does the feature affect external users, what % , in what capacity (working
with Product Management team)
    does the feature affect critical processes and does it have Severity1 impact
on our ability to do critical processes
        If any of these answers are Yes, the feature is prioritized. Technical
debt is included in this review as it can affect external customers or our
ability to support critical processes.
First we review these critical features and allocate approximate capacity. After
that we review non-critical impacting features. We prioritize based on next
level impact, urgency, and support needed for XFN project delivery.

In case of resource planning tool it was needed for accomplishing financial
forecast for 2025 for entire company. We investigated MVP of what is needed for
the new teams and addressed it creatively- balancing user training and the new
features build. That allowed us to double our user base with a minimum size
team.

Anonymous · Answer

I successfully introduced several processes that significantly improved our
engineering efficiency and product delivery outcomes. One of the key initiatives
was optimizing our existing application architecture. By spearheading the
migration to a microservices architecture using Golang and PostgreSQL, I was
able to enhance scalability and improve flexibility, leading to a remarkable 50x
increase in order processing capacity. This allowed us to accommodate more
transactions without compromising performance.

Additionally, I implemented a robust logging and alerting mechanism using
Elasticsearch and New Relic, which improved our system observability and
incident response times. This overhaul reduced our mean time to recovery (MTTR)
by approximately 40%, ensuring that we maintained a seamless user experience
even during peak traffic periods. Quality assurance was another area where I
enacted changes; I built a scalable automated testing framework utilizing
Cypress, which accelerated our delivery cycles by reducing manual testing time
and increasing test coverage.

The rationale behind these changes was to address the growing user base and the
increased complexity of our operations. By both improving backend infrastructure
and enhancing testing efficiency, we were able to deliver exceptional user
experiences while balancing technical constraints and business needs.
Furthermore, I actively participated in weekly leadership calls to align our
technology roadmap with the company’s strategic goals, ensuring that our
engineering efforts were consistently contributing to the broader vision of
Zebpay.

Anonymous · Answer

1. Can you walk me through your process for prioritizing product features and
    making decisions on what to develop?

At xys, I followed the following approach which guided me through the
prioritization process.
 1. Access each product's strategic alignment - how does this add to the
    overarching goal of the company.
 2. Gather data and statistics to compare these two projects - the impact it
    makes to the company - either in moving the Customer Satisfaction or
    increase in revenue.
 3. Are there any customer feedback we can incorporated while we develop the
    product.
 4. Product/Resource alignment.

By following these steps I could fairly make decisions on which projects would
my team members would work on and communicate the same to the leadership to get
a buy in. By having a buyin from my leadership and my own team and aligning with
the product we could succesfully execute on projects.

Anonymous · Answer

Resource is always critical and my job is to optimize the Resource to have a
maximum impact for the company and the team members. Some of the critical
metrics are:
a) Impact - How will delivering the project will move the needle (either it
should improve customer sat. or reduce the cost or increase revenue)
b) Alignment - do we have all the resources needed - tech stack/ Resource etc or
are there gaps which will stall
c) Scope - will it be high effort project or a low effort project.
Clearly having numbers behind these will give us a score on which we can
prioritize the project

Anonymous · Answer

Situation:
We had a new product launch coming up and were required to build data pipelines
for the new product and integrate this new product data into existing analytics
and reporting products the business relied on.
Action:
I split up the delivery of the required data into 2 phases. One was MVP and the
other post-MVP. The MVP program was designed to deliver on the most critical
data points required. Criticality was established by determining data required
for contractual and executive reporting.
Result:
Product data was integrated on time at product launch

Anonymous · Answer

When it comes to new product design we work closely with Product team.
We leverage their research of users' preferences and priorities.

For instance, we recently had situation when we needed to define product
requirements for consumer engagement strategy. I am somewhat new to the field so
I could not vote for one approach vs another. My task was to help product team
to be able to define what they need while being supported by eng team, and avoid
a last minute drill in data platform.

I met with product team to understand their thought process. I helped them to
classify the potential types of requirements according to the data needed. That
helped us to :
- decouple actual product strategy from data requirements (do we send alerts
daily or monthly?)
- ensure that all requirements are classified according to the data needs 
- analyze impact of different data elements on overall product features,

Once we saw how different engagement activities map to data elements, it became
clear which elements are most impactful and will take priority. Amending that
with dependencies helped to build datasets that were self-contained. 
My next step was to review that with product team. I called a meeting with
Product manager and demonstrated our ability of fulfilling the requirements
regardless of actual engagement strategy.
That demo was accepted very well and we are rolling the product out as planned.

Anonymous · Answer

I would first  gather information from the team on level of effort for all
product features. From there, I would gather key stakeholders together to
determine what would make a minimum viable product. The product features needed
to meet minimum viable product would need to be accomplished first based on
resource availability. Once minimum viable product is met, we would move on to
items that would enhance the product while keeping enough time for quality
testing of the product before product launch.

Anonymous · Answer

At Auctane, as a EM my role was to ensure that my team has the right items
prioritzed for the team to work on.
If the priority is not right, we might be working on either a wrong item or one
which is blocked - both will not be good for the productivity of the team. My
job was to involve the right folks so that decisions can be made faster.
In order to priortize I used a matrix - with Impact, effort and dependencies and
we would score each feature requested against this - I would inovle PM and at
least one Senior engieer - a feature is atomic but might have some dependencies
- which was identified - we would then put then in 30/60/90 day bucket - from
which sprints would derive.

Anonymous · Answer

At xyz, I would always get the metrics for which the projects needs to be
prioritized -  most of important metrics were 
a) Customer Impact
b) Increased revenue
c) Decrease in Cost of maintenance

There will always be more things to be done by the team than there are resources
available. Invariably it leads to resource contention - as a leader my job is to
make sure that we maximize the resource utilization. 
For e.g there was a Reporting project asked by few high valued customers the
same set of resource was supposed to work on a re-architect project. I used the
above three criteria to determine which project gets the priority.  .

Anonymous · Answer

In order to prioritize product feature and decisions, I would look for the
following 1. What is the business problem being solved? 2. Being customer
obsessed, How does it improve the user experience?  Are their alternatives for
customers. 3. What is the return on investment on effort vs business
entitlement. This would be across business units/groups that depend on this
feature. 4. Are their regulatory, safety, security and compliance mandatory
aspects to be considered

Can you walk me through your process for prioritizing product features and making decisions on what to develop?

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