Clarify: Can you give me an example of the needs that you are referring to? Are we talking about new product features or infrastructure related requirements?

– Yes let’s talk about you need to build a new product and each team has set of needs in order to proceed. How do you pick which ones to prioritize?

For Sales, there are metrics such as which market segment we are planning to track, how important the product feature is based on competitive analysis, the revenue, market share, number of customers interested in the feature. Typically, there is prioritization of the tasks at this level before we present it to the Engineering team.

Once we have understood the ask from sales side, it is important to align with the Engineering team for planning the execution path.

For Engineering, there is usually breakdown of the tasks in terms of duration, resources, cost for the resources, infrastructure (cloud, tools etc) necessary in the process.

1) Define strategic imperatives

2) Define strategic choices

3) Evaluate strategic choices using a combination of metrics categories

a) Sales related

-Revenue

-Growth

– Competitiveness

– Alignment with company objectives

-Number of customers impacted

b) Engineering related

– Cost of implementation

– Implementation complexity

– Risk to existing code.

The evaluation process can involve assinging weightages to these metrics and the assiging score against each of the strategic choices

Lets say sales team is requesting a feature that will help with a new deal while eng team is requesting to fix critical bugs that can make product more stable and reliable and thereby reducing customer complants

I would first work with each lead to understand the request in detail

Sales Feature:

1. How many customers would benefit?
2. Are these big or small customers?
3. Impact to revenue?
4. Understand risks of missing this in current release?