The purpose of this document is to think through what happens when the balance of capacity within Product-Design-Engineering is not perfect

It’s the default case that it’s not going to be perfectly aligned

It’s important to understand the tradeoffs of having constraints in each function, and how we want to handle those constraints

How do we allow for things to be out of balance for some period of time without pushing the other functions into burnout?

Product

What is the role of product?

Too much Product

What bad things happen when you have too much product?

not enough scope for people to go around, often becomes political with who gets what projects
manufacturing scope and projects to get recognition
- which leads to product bloat with too many features
- A lot of iteration that doesn’t add value - over-optimization on small feature improvements
Empire building can happen, given that they’re not getting satisfaction through work and delivery, they seek fulfillment elsewhere
Overhead of managing people

Untitled

What bad things happen when you have too little product?

Chaos happens. With too few product people, engineers get massively whiplashed because there’s no translation (converting business need into product) or prioritization layer
Engineering effectiveness drops as they try to figure out the implementation of high level features that are not specified in detail
With enough chaos, engineers quit, and it’s always your best engineers that quit first
The wrong things get built at the wrong time - no prioritization
- no ability to buffer requests from other business units and set priorities appropriately