You have to ship X features, which requires 15 Engineers but you only have 8, what would you do?

I would ask them to hire more engineers, just kidding. To solve this I would understand perspectives from both the client & engineering side and based upon that made a decision. So, continuing with our #productseries, this time I would be answering the above question. If you haven’t read my past articles do check them here :D

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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 ship all the features. Now to mitigate the risk I would do these things -

1. First, talk with the clients to understand why they want to prioritize all the features, are all features aligned 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 the release. (As for small UI updates, things could be managed by updating the codebase even after the release).
2. 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, will ask senior management, can we hire new engineers from an external source? If permission is allowed, then would reiterate over the roadmap and start assigning tasks to the new team.
3. 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. Or would ask them for an extended timeline. Once they’re aligned, then will work on building that feature.

Thus, these are the steps I might follow depending on the priority of the projects, if it’s most important then might ask my engineering team to do some over-work, and they can get extra time off later on, after talking with the management.

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