What is your framework to prioritize product areas and features when you have limited engineering or product management resources as the head of the product area?

Resource constraints are a very common challenge for any team and company that I’ve worked for. I tend to focus on business priorities and how the identified product area can make an impact on those priorities in my framework rather than letting resource constraints limit my thought process. Once everyone, including leadership, stakeholders andt the team, are all agreed on the business priorities, I will then look into several solutions and how these solutions can move the needle.

Another important step is to compare the identified business priorities to other priorities and do a thorough tradeoff analysis. In particular, what do we have to trade off if we go with the solutions I proposed? Does it make sense to put resources in the area that I identified instead of others? As a product lead, I prioritize business impact and believe it is also practical to keep in mind short vs long term value we want to capture for the company.

I try and start with a combined top-down / bottom-up exercise.

Top-down: what are the top 1-3 business objectives that we can move the needle on with product work? Let's prioritize those.

Bottom-up: what is the bare minimum keep-the-lights-on staffing level required to run our service / business?

If there is any surplus from this exercise, you take on more of the backlog and can do more ambitious thing. If there is a deficit, time to deprioritize certain investment areas until the team is staffed to a healthy level.