If there are 3 different items on top priority for a release and the client is insisting on getting all 3 delivered in the same release. As a PM you know there is not enough engineering capacity. What will you do?

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If there are 3 different items on top priority for a release and the client is insisting on getting all 3 delivered in the same release. As a PM you know there is not enough engineering capacity. What will you do?

Asked at 6sense over a year ago

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Abhijeet Das · Answer 1 · 2025-07-07T12:13:20+0000

As the premise goes all three items are top priority items and are critical for the client.

I would like to first understand whether this was an adhoc request from the client or it was something part of the original launch plan which got changed due to executional delays and now customer is not happy and pushing to follow the original release plan

If it is related to executional delay, in that case, I will first check with engg team on possibility of adding more resources or evalaute the option to pause any tech debt/ performance tuning related work for the next 1-2 sprints depending on the time required to finish all the 3 features.

If that is not possible, I will try to explain the client the reasons for exectutional delay and that we awould try our best to deliver as per our original plan. However since we are running short on time, I would like to understand, if we can focus on the must have parts of the features, so that we can launch as per the plan (which will be of limited anture) and keep improving as we make further iterations.

If it is an adhoc request, then I would have the first discussion with client, trying to understand what changed between now and back during the earlier alignment. What is driving the urgency. I would like to understand the key metrics impacted by not doing all the releases together and try to check the genuineness of this urgency until which I will push back.

In case, the client is still persistent, I would talk about the trade-offs of supporting this request. Additionally, I will work closely with the client to redefine the MVP scope of each of the features to ensure we are supporting only those requests which are essential for the end users and anything which is not part of the core flow can sit in the backlog for now, until we revisit our next prioritisation exercise.

Himant Goyal · Answer 2 · 2022-07-12T06:07:04+0000

I will ask some clarifying questions here

Q1. Are the items already on roadmap? Yes

Q2, Were they expected to deliver at the same time ? No, but now they are important to be delivered together

Q3, What is the objective of this change? What is the motivation behind delivering all of them together?

Q4. What is the impact of all of these features?

Q5. Are there any inter-dependencies between the features?

Q6. Any specific metrics that we are trying to achieve?

Q7. Is any Competition associated with the release?

1. After getting the answers to the above questions, I will work on a plan with impact for each of these items? Document the impact for each feature, level of effort, and resource availability.

2. understand the order of priority from customer, if not all 3 can be delivered, then what should be the order of priority for each feature/

3. Work with engineering on the bandwidth, or if additional resources are available or if there is an option to borrow resources from other teams. If resources are available then how much %/hours etc, then plan accordingly

3. If not sufficient resources are available, then I will present my facts to the customer politely and mention that based on the resource availability we will focus on the top priority and rest we will deliver in subsequent phases

Zafeer Rais · Answer 3 · 2022-03-04T20:23:33+0000

As a Product Manager, it is your job to identify tradeoffs and pick which item is the most critical to work at this point in time. Hence, prioritization is one of the most important skills of a product manager.

I use a prioritization framework to identify which items the team should be working on. The framework looks for the following elements in each feature:
1. Impact (Business and User) - How much % of your user base is this feature going to impact. What is the business revenue or impact that this feature will generate?
2. Urgency - Is this feature request time-bound? For example, does it require to be fixed by the Black Friday sale?

3. Cost/Return on Investment - What is the engineering effort required for this? Number of sprint? Any external integrations?

Business teams can only dictate either of two things - scope or timeline. You can never ask the engineering team to build something in a given period of time. You can give your specs and ask for a timeline or Give a timeline and ask what can be delivered in this timeline from the overall scope.

I will use the above framework to prioritize features.

However, de-prioritizing features does not mean you should not solve the customer problem, I would speak to the customer to understand the problem and suggest workarounds till the time the feature is delivered.

Finally, if a customer is really difficult to deal with, these are the steps that can also be deployed if the engineering team does not have capacity:

1. Request assistance from other engineering teams or hire new engineers

2. Cut down the scope of the feature if it is to be delivered in a given timeline

3. If the scope cannot be compromised on, rework the timeline and push the delivery date.

amrita_n · Answer 4 · 2022-02-22T01:40:45+0000

1. If the capacity cannot be increased, I'll ask the engineering teams to brainstorm on the constraints/trade-off's we might have with including all the 3 items in the release, e.g. reduced testing times, no regression, potential bugs etc.

2. I'll communicate the feedback along with the resulting risks involved to the client (poor product quality, customer dissatisfaction, increase in churn rate etc.).

3. I'll have an open discussion on prioritizing the items so as to avoid the above repercussions.

Shubhamsingla · Answer 5 · 2022-02-22T01:34:28+0000

I would first understand why there's a miscommunication between the client and my team. For top priority projects, roadmaps are already built initially and shared with the clients/stakeholders. I'm assuming the client suddenly asks us to release all the features. Now to mitigate the risk I would do these things -

First, talk with the clients to understand why they want to prioritize all the features, are they all align with our current goal? If not then what's the most important one. Also, would understand whether those features could be built after the release or need to build before release. (As for small UI updates, things could be managed by updating the codebase even after the release).
Thereafter I would talk with my engineering team to know their bandwidth and in no way I would pressurize my team to work extra hours. I will understand, can we build all those features by taking the help of other engineers from another department/pod. If possible then I would take all features and start building them.
If not, then I would go back to clients and negotiate with them to prioritize the most important one first, by creating & showing them the particular feature's impact vs Effort. Once they're aligned , then will work on building that feature.

Posted my first answer here, open for all the feedbacks 🙌

Shelly Gupta · Answer 6 · 2022-02-22T01:34:12+0000

In my opinion the question should be there are 3 items on the Roadmap but customer wants it delivered immediately in the upcoming release. Also, my assumption is that this customer is very key to the organization. The important vs urgent analysis and MosCow analysis should have already happened because I have already decided that these features are important because they are on the Roadmap. The issue is to juggle the roadmap to meet the needs of one customer.

1) Reevaluate the three items -

       a) break them into smaller pieces to understand what can be done to provide bare minimum functionality to the customer given the current resource capacity,

       b) the current features in the release, dependencies between features so thet they are appropriately sequenced and

       c) how changing release features impacts other customers.

2) Engage the sales team (if this customer is a big prospect), Account team (if this is a big existing account) and senior management to apprise them of the situation and steps I am taking to address the needs of the customer.

2) Call the customer in question to understand their needs - what is the urgency and why? Run a few what if scenarios with them based on my internal analysis that I completed in step 1. For instance, What if I provide A from feature 1 and B from Feature 2 and C from feature 3 in this release and the rest in Y time. Give them a clear breakdown and sequencing of features in a high level milestone based project plan with timelines so that they know when all 3 features will be delivered. Also, keep them engaged throughout the process and also keep the senior management apprised of the status.

Ram G. · Answer 7 · 2022-02-18T20:08:26+0000

Further prioritize by the following steps:

1. Open discussion with the client about end-to-end capabilities. Understand if the client has plans in place to actually deploy the three items in the given timeframe. If not deprioritize.

2. Understand the sequencing, if one item depends on another item in the queue. This may be deferred till engineering capacity is available.

3. Economic value for each item. What is the biggest bang for the buck?

Sameer Subhedar · Answer 8 · 2022-02-08T00:11:39+0000

For this behavioral interview question, I think it is important for a product manager to understand what can be achieved against what cannot be achieved.

Knowing your limitations can be a blessing.

I will do the following steps before I can discuss with the clients the concerns around getting everything done:

1. In situations where everything looks like a highest priority it is important to decide what really is a priority and help your stake holders understand the same.

I will run some basic priortisation methods like:

a. Important v/s Urgent matrix to find out which items belong to which category

b. We can also run the MoSCoW - Must do, Should do, Could do or Won't do analysis.

Based on the analysis done above - will decide the priority of the items.

2. Talk to the engineering team in order to understand the capacity that they have and figure out ways in which some more capacity can be created like checking if there are any lower priority items that they have on their backlog which they can drop in order to pick up the items which have been prioritised above.

3. Talk to the client and be open for feedback if any that the client has on the order of the priority of the items.

Radhika Ramana · Answer 9 · 2022-03-11T19:39:44+0000

Seems like this is a common PM interview question to gauge how we as PMs (or Project mgr, BSAs, or anybody with similar jobs) can analyze and assess the situation. I have been asked this question at Align Technologies recently for a TPM role.

To me, there can be a variety of reasons why Business/Client is asking to prioritize all three at the same time. So I would put myself in their shoes to analyze the situation better by reviewing those items as my immediate task. We cannot say NO directly to any client without analyzing the situation.

I will buy some time to discuss with my Engineering team to identify the following:

Can we check if there are any dependencies between the three that one has to go before the others or any external dependencies?
I will gather all the pros and cons of attempting all 3 items for the same release.
Can we meet the timelines?
How many effort hours are needed?
I also will collect more information from the Engineering team that if we attempt these 3, can we remove any low-hanging fruits from the existing backlog that may not add value to the client right away.

I would then go back to my client with the feedback provided by the Engineering team and request to remove any low-hanging fruit items.

Advocating client is always key in this type of situations.

I also liked the Moscow rule that one of the answers mentioned.

Tristan Rinehart · Answer 10 · 2022-03-06T02:00:07+0000

If having all the features in one release is important then I would suggest to the client to wait on upgrading until all desired features have shipped. Then the client can upgrade multiple releases-worth of the features they want.

DTX DATaN · Answer 11 · 2022-03-04T20:26:44+0000

For my opinion, for this question we see key part is stakeholder management. We also have 2 assumption from the question:

1/ Client wants 3 feature in the same release

2/ there is not enough capacity for this release like client wants

So our solution with dealing with 2 those stakeholders together to meet the point:

1/ With Client: Based on the agreed roadmap before, understand why they want those 3 features at the same time, dealing with them to release 2 feature or one as roadmap. Somehow, we have agreed documents before to legally discussing with them.

2/ With Engineer: Trade-off discusstion - Reduce process and workload to focus on 3 those feature. Add more benifits and suggest them to work extra time.

3/ The worst case - with extra budget - asking for more engineers envolve this realese. Sometime, the reason of customer is logically, they add more budget and they are the biggest our customer - we must have special plan and priority for them.