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Suppose 10 Google Cloud customers come to you and say they want you to customize your product for them. Your engineering team has the bandwidth to handle only one of the requests. Walk me through how you’d evaluate the customers and decide which ones to build for.

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  • For Technical PM
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Assumptions : I am the Product Manager for GCP and I can set the priorities of the Engineering team working with me . Going with these assumptions , here is what I will do

 

  1. Check out which one among them are affecting real business objectives –  eliminate the ones that dont

  2. Of all of these check out the biggest Accounts ( will be used if there is a Tie ) – this will decide on the reach of the changes

  3. Check for what is impact of the business objectives – ( Could be measured by contribution to Revenue / Cost Savings / TTM etc )

  4. Talk to the tech team on what is the effort needed to solve these in Mandays

  5. We can give each of these a time graded star of 1 – 3 for for High Medium and Low impact / effort / reach

  6. Finally go with R*I/ E and check for scores –

  7. Order by descending orders and the top 3 are the ones that I will build

Clarifying questions:

  1. Is there any additional information available for these 10 customer accounts such as timeline expectations? No
  2. How are we measuring the Engineering team bandwidth? Is this for current sprint, this quarter or FY?  This quarter.
  3. Are there any stakeholder management necessary for me to make this prioritization? sure.
Strategy:
Evaluate: I will first evaluate each customization request by internally speaking with customer success, sales/solutioning team. Once I gather internal information, I may decide to speak with the customer or ask further information to understand the customer use case for the product, break it down into must have, should have and nice to have criteria by feature requested. Understand their timeline expectations for the product.

Offer Alternatives:

  1.  I will evaluate whether there are any existing product features that can satisfy the customer requirements without customization.
  2. I will also look into any add-on products within Google ecosystem that may help customer’s usecase.
  3. Review the near term product roadmap to evaluate whether any of the customization features are already on the roadmap.
Prioritize based on the following criteria:
Evaluate the impact:
  1. Evaluate the curent and future product roadmap to understand where the strategy is headed and how does the requested customization fit in? Eliminate the ones that don’t.
  2. Is there any of the request amongst these 10 customers that can benefit all existing and future customer needs?
Revenue/ $ value:
  1. Compare customer size, annual revenue, any future inside sales opportunitiy for all 10 customers.
  2. Check whether any of the customer is willing to spend additional $ to expedite the customization.

 

Get Stakeholder buy in:
  1. As a PM there are often internal stakeholders such as CSM who is trying to salvage a customer relationship or keep a customer happy who is approaching their renewal time. Are there any at risk customers on this list of 10 that we need to consider?
  2. Do we use any of these 10 customer accounts for references in our sales cycle?
  3. How is the relationship with each customer account? Is there any customer account that has helped us in the past as a design partner?

 

Internal resources:
  1. Get Engineering team to weigh in on the effort estimation for the must have features.
  2. T-shirt sizing S/M/L/XL effort and number of resources/time required to complete each.
  3. Break down each customization request to identify whether there is any overlap in the customization that the customer is requesting, try to find common ground.
To summarize, I will prioritize the list of 10 customers requested customization to identify top 3 accounts and prioritize the next 12 month roadmap using this criteria-
  1. Impact: evaluating whether this is a custom implementation or a product feature enhancement that can benefit our wider customer base
  2. Revenue: Look into the $ value based criteria as mentioned above
  3. Identify whether there is stakeholder demand to prioritize any of these customer accounts.
If it’s not feasible to sketch out top 3 customer accounts to proceed, I will also evaluate whether funds are available to expand Eng team’s capacity to expedite the customization work based on the effort estimate by the Eng team.