Tell me about a time when you had limited resources , however were faced with 2 urgent time bound deliverables. Which one did you build and why?(Walk me through the steps of the problem solving, prioritization and stakeholder mgmt)

Situation-  I was assigned as a product manager for a leading entertainment brand. The brand allowed customers to watch talk content, reality TV shows etc. Some of the content was free, for the rest customer could purchase an episode or a series. The issue on hand was two equally prioritized requirements

1) An issue where users saw a delay for watching content after purchasing content

2) Delay in signing in after the user launches the app.

Both these issues were incidentally related to the same service in the background viz. entitlements hence however addressing one issue e.g. An issue where users saw a delay for watching content after purchasing content would make the other one worse. Content issue was affecting monetization and sign in issue was affecting engagement

Task- My task was to find an interim solution that addresses both while giving enough time to the development team to address the issue

Action- I did some analysis

1) entitlement service uses a functionality called session storage for its operation. Hence at the start of the day when the user logs in, it stores the session in a caching service called Memcached. Updating this service regularly would in fact resolve the issue with content delay however it would create a load on the entitlement issue

2) The entitlement service needed more than just horizontal scaling, it needed to be rewritten for performance scaling

I looked at the data, I found that peak load on entitlement service happens during 4-8 pm in the respective timezone however only 40% of content purchases happen in that period. Hence creating a rule based update e.g delayed cache update between 4-8 pm and a immediate cache update for rest of the period would reduce the load on the entitlement service and also reduce content delay issue for 60% of users. Once this was addressed, we came up with a detailed list of requirements for the entitlement service. The solution was a combination of short term queues to long term development of microservices based architecture.

Result- The prioritization helped reduce customer compliants of content viewing after purchase in the short term with a plan to upgrade the entitlement service in the longer term. The entitlement service itself was upgraded in tranches.