You are a senior PM for a data product. How would you prioritize requirements between top customer requests, technical debt of previously delivered features, and partner team requirements for critical integration?

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You are a senior PM for a data product. How would you prioritize requirements between top customer requests, technical debt of previously delivered features, and partner team requirements for critical integration?

Asked at Uber in the past year

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Krishna · Answer 1 · 2024-08-04T04:04:20+0000

As a senior PM, multiple requests that are conflicting with each other are commonplace. I would handle them by proper prioritisation

For top customer requests:

I would ask what does top customer request mean? is it that thesecustomers are key clients with high ROI?
Are we getting paid for these delivering these features?
I will check if these features can be sold to other clients as well
What is the relation with the client? Is there possibility to cross-sell other products? or can we jsut increase goodwill and leverage it down the line?
Do these requests align with overall roadmap?
How much effort is needed to develop these features?
How do these features align with my product roadmap/strategy in gneral, like few feature requests are so niche with customisations that its hard to sell it to others, at these times based on responses to above questions I wuld aptly place them in priroity list

Feature integration

Impact to my product
Cost of implementation
What is the amount of effort needed from my team, and changed needed for my product? VS overall benefit
Is this aligned with product strategy of the department/businessunit my product and the internal team requesting integration are reporting to?

Technical debt:

Are the issues in technical debt serious? like performance issues? if so this would hinder user expeiernce which would frustrate clients and so i woul prioiritise them alongside new features
Cost ot solve the technical debt vs Value realised
What led to technical debt from previous features in first place? - rushed release to adhere to promises doen to client?

I would use frameworks like RICE, MOSCOW as well with some tweaks

Parva Shrivastava · Answer 2 · 2024-06-20T16:23:37+0000

As a Senior PM for data products, I will undertake following steps to balance the stakeholder expectation and carry out prioritization.

A. Check for alignment to Uber's business goal and strategic vision.

Uber's vision is to provide reliable transaporation for everyone everywhere. For the data team, this can be transalated into ensuring reliable data sources available 24/7 globally, technical infrastrucutre that can support scalability goals of Uber, quality control of various data types, right instrumentation available to query the data and run analytics etc.

B. Outline impact

I will clearly assess both the technical and business impact of urgent stakeholder request, tech debt initiatives and partner integration. To do so, I will categorize it into 2 categories:

1. Hard impact

This can be measured by possible revenue by meeting customer request, number of projects going live by enabling partner integration, latency, response time and infrastructure improvement as a result of tech debt initiatives.

2. Soft impact

Accomodating customer request can open up future opportunities of revenue for Uber or protect existing revenue and relationship with customer

Enabling partner integration can allow for easier scalability across partners for future projects and help Uber deepen its partner relationship.

C. Cost-benefit analysis

Upon carrying out Step A and B, I will look at the timeline I have for each of the requests. I will prioritize the items based on its overall business impact on Uber and its contribution to metrics (hard and soft metric) and bring alignment between all stakeholders.