Never-ending Architecture and Customer Feature Trade-Off

One Primary challenge of product management is the never ending trade off between architecture and customer facing features. Engineering wants to know how much resource to contribute to next generation architecture, versus sales people who are begging to just add a certain feature so they can close more this quarter. How do you find the right balance?

If the organization cannot with confidence and consistency state where it will be in 2-3 years, then you will suffer from incrementalism, and at some point likely miss out on a strategic shift. I am a huge believer in the visual product vision as outlined in the post Do you have a visual vision? Your organization, including sales, engineering, marketing, management, must have a clear product vision 2-3 years out, otherwise product teams are working in silos and making their best guesses, rather than marching towards a unified vision.

Once you have a clearly defined vision, the current quarterly and annual goals affect more immediate product trade-off decisions - there is nothing wrong with sacrificing long term for short term revenue, depending on the company goals and focus - there is no use having the best next-generation architecture if you are out of runway in the market

The next step is to analyze the current business and understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT). While this is the start of a longer business plan for each product or the product line, you should be able to identity areas of opportunity for revenue. Even a fully mature product always has opportunities to penetrate new markets - often called a Product Line Extension (PLE).

Once you have the right strategic framework, align the development team and other stakeholders around the purpose of each and every every item in a release/sprint e.g:

S - Strategic - moves us towards vision

R - Revenue - immediate revenue generating feature

E - Extension - moves the product into a new space/segment.

C - customer satisfaction issue

B - Bug fix

A single feature may have a combination of codes and the main point is to be aligned why something is being added to the solution. Your biggest challenge (as always) is going to be saying no to people who see a small amount of revenue in a space that just isn't strategic or big enough for the company, and ends up a distraction. This is where the vision comes in - you must help everyone understand that by focusing on the vision they will end up better off by having an easier to sell solution/product, and more revenue, by focusing on the long term.

Feature trade off is like a teeter-totter (seesaw) - but without a vision, clear data on the product business, and an understanding of the current business objectives, you can't effectively make trade-offs. Otherwise you're just blindly moving to one side to the other.