If you have only one engineering resource, where will you invest it (prioritization)? Fixing a critical bug or shipping a critical feature?

Question

If you have only one engineering resource, where will you invest it (prioritization)? Fixing a critical bug or shipping a critical feature?

Asked at Google over a year ago

1.1k views

Asked at

1.1k views

Answers (3)

To answer this question, Log in.

Top Execution interview questions

Imagine you were in charge of Facebook Watch. What metric would you want to measure?13 answers | 9.1k views
Weekly active users (WAU) for iPhone app dropped. What happened?10 answers | 6.3k views
You are the PM of Instagram stories. What goal would you set and how would you measure success?10 answers | 14k views
See Execution PM Interview Questions

Invite members
Invite by email

Add another

Debasis Dash · Answer 1 · 2021-10-03T13:40:43+0000

Clarification:

As mentioned, there is only one resource to deploy either in bug fixing or to launch a new feature. There is no mention of time taken for each. Does that mean it takes equal effort in both? Yes
Do we know whether the product is launched or a new one? Already launched since many years
Do we know which product is this? Assume google search
Is there a continuous degradation of any metric due to the defect? No but there would ceratinly be a one time improvement.
There are multiple metrics that could be improved by fixing the defect. Do we know which one would be improved? You can assume and walk me through it
There are multiple metrics that could be imporved by launching a new feature. Do we know which one would be improved? You can assume and walk me through it
Is there any specific metrics we are focussing at the moment? You tell me.

A typical consumer journey would be Acquisition, Activation, engagement, retention, monetization and referral.

As it is google serach, the primary focus is on retention and monetization. Google serach has almost saturated in terms of acquisition, activation and engagement.

I would validate the number of users and the frequency at which it impacts the users. I would assume that by fixing a defect the DAU increases by X% and this results in Y% increase it revenue through search ad in next 3 years.

By shipping a new feature we are going to help the advertisers to launch new variety of ads and that will increase the revenue by Z% for next 3 years.

As Z>Y, I would choose to ship a new feature and deprioritize fixing the defect given that the effort and time taken to launch is same and Z is aligned to the organiation/product objective.

Shoaib Hussain · Answer 2 · 2022-07-27T20:44:40+0000

Let's try to understand the statement by understanding the Company

Assumptions:

Since we only have one engineering resource, it's fair to assume that the company will be a startup
And if we only have one resource available, it's fair to assume that the other resources may be occupied in some other tasks, implying that this startup falls under the Growth phase in the Product lifecycle.
Since the startup is in the growth phase, it will primarily focus on acquisition and retention rather than monetization as current goals in the Product roadmap.

Now that we have a high-level overview of the company, we'll understand the impact associated with the above solutions; we'll check whether for the feature implemented in live, this "critical bug" is acting as a blocker(S1 Issue) for a huge segment of users or not, or whether it is affecting a smaller chunk of users.

And whether either fixing the critical bug or existing this new critical feature will add value to the business or not(I e aligned towards the company's current goal or not)

Parallelly, the dev effort and time will be required to either fix the bug or implement the feature.

taking into account the above factors, we can give scores to these solutions:

	Impact		Effort
	User	Business	Effort
Critical Bug
Critical Feature

And based on the scores, we can invest the resource accordingly

: )

thearrow · Answer 3 · 2021-07-17T13:13:58+0000

I would first like to know

Impact of the Critical bug, efforts required in fixing the bug.
1. Effort Assumption: Low
Impact of shipping Critical feature, efforts required.
1. Effort Assumption: High

If the impact is quite low (i.e impacting only a few users), I will look for another way around for the solution to check if it can be solved operationally for a few days until we fix the bug. Assuming here that the critical feature we want to ship will add more value to the product and to the users.

If it's impacting a high number of users, then the bug should be fixed over any other priority item regardless of efforts being high or low.