Can you describe a time when you had too much work to do and not enough time? How did you handle it?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

I was working with 5 customers at once, and had to focus on those activities
where I could make a difference, make the most impact, that I could not
delegate, and where I could balance with other priorities - in order to do that,
I measured the priority of the tasks by the cost of delay, in other words, the
impact of not doing them at that time. Then, with more clarity about the
priorities, I thought which ones I could delegate to other team members, and if
that made sense, with the required support and guidance from my side. Working as
a team and not trying to get everything done yourself is key in the long term
with multiple, competing priorities. Then, organizing my time well in short,
focused timeslots for the most important tasks, made a difference.

Anonymous · Answer

At Expedia I had two things genuinely competing for the same engineering effort.
Search was the visible priority — everyone had opinions on it, there was
pressure to keep improving it, and it was the safe thing to invest in. But when
I actually mapped the creative workflow, the bigger constraint was versioning —
rebuilding every asset across formats — which nobody was talking about. I
couldn't fund both well.

So the way I handled it wasn't to split effort evenly or work longer to do both
— it was to decide which one actually bound the outcome. Search was already good
enough that more work on it wouldn't move creative throughput much; versioning
was where the five-days-per-asset was being lost. So I made the deliberate call
to bet the effort on versioning and consciously defer search — even though it
was the less obvious, harder-to-sell choice.

The part I'm careful about: deferring isn't dropping. I came back to search
later and improved it properly — detailed queries, point-of-interest search,
compound queries, with an eval to find the real gaps — but on a timeline that
made sense once the bigger constraint was solved. The way I handle competing
priorities is to find the one that actually binds the outcome and sequence
around it, rather than treating them as equal because they're both loud.

Anonymous · Answer

So prioritizing tasks is one of the most important skills for a product manager.
As a PM, you are constantly bombarded with ideas and feature requests from
sales, partners, customers, and even your own learnings from conversations. But
practically, you cannot implement everything, so prioritization becomes
critical.

I follow a two-layered approach or mental model to prioritize tasks.

The first layer is to understand whether the feature or idea aligns with the
overall company strategy or not—whether the goal is to increase revenue, user
engagement, or user growth. If it doesn’t align, I usually don’t take it
forward.

Once it passes this filter, in the second layer I evaluate each task based on
impact vs effort. I try to understand the impact it will have on both the
customer and the business—like how many users it will affect, what revenue or
engagement it can drive—and then compare it with the effort required in terms of
time, resources, and complexity.

Based on this, I prioritize high-impact, low-effort items first, followed by
strategic high-impact initiatives, and deprioritize low-impact ones.

Anonymous · Answer

I broke down the tasks into micro tasks and defined a mini roadmap for tasks. It
helped me to priotitise the work. Time needed to complete a task, implementation
effort and impact on business helped me to prioritise the tasks

Anonymous · Answer

I often had to balance recurring leadership reports, ad-hoc requests, and
testing updates to our data pipeline at the same time. I managed this by
prioritizing tasks, automating checks where I could, and keeping stakeholders
updated. As a result, I delivered everything on time and with high quality.

Anonymous · Answer

At a high level, applied RICE methodology to rank the tasks. Validated this
ranking with key stakeholders before finalizing my approach.

In a specific case, I had to balance between two projects/programs that involved
shipping a new feature, a customer support escalation, and an ask from a peer
team who had taken a dependency on our service. Here, even before applying RICE,
I realized the ask from the peer team could be delegated to an engineer without
a significant impact. An ad hoc approach based on MAU/DAU was used to estimate
Reach and Impact, and Effort was estimated using previous experience on
support.

Anonymous · Answer

Yes, There is a new client with a requirement which we have already created a
solution for a different client. So for showcasing it we cloned the app with few
name changes. Our ceo had a call with the client by evening and i had to
complete the testing the entire app before that, at the same time i had to
complete a documentation in another project which has to be submitted to client
at the same time. in this project there are 3 members and in that i am the only
person to test the app. so i asked one of the team mate to work on the
documentation and said that i will join as soon as the testing is completed and
i started testing the app. I completed the testing and the documetation is also
almost done i completed the remaining, reviewed the document and submitted it.
The reason for my act is we cannot make any mistake while making a demo for a
new client, since i am the only person to test the app, i am responsible to give
a quality output. In the another project there are three members and we can
coloborate and work together.

Anonymous · Answer

Yes, There is a new client with a requirement which we have already created a
solution for a different client. So for showcasing it we cloned the app with few
name changes. Our ceo had a call with the client by evening and i had to
complete the testing the entire app before that, at the same time i had to
complete a documentation in another project which has to be submitted to client
at the same time. in this project there are 3 members and in that i am the only
person to test the app. so i asked one of the team mate to work on the
documentation and said that i will join as soon as the testing is completed and
i started testing the app. I completed the testing and the documetation is also
almost done i completed the remaining, reviewed the document and submitted it.

Can you describe a time when you had too much work to do and not enough time? How did you handle it?

Practice this question with AI

Go Premium

Community Answers

Unlock Full Access

Unlock Full Access

Unlock Full Access

Unlock Full Access

Unlock Full Access

Unlock Full Access

Unlock Full Access

Unlock Full Access

Practice More Questions