You're caught between marketing and engineering teams on product features. How do you choose the right path?

Focus on key objectives: revenue growth, customer satisfaction, and technical viability. Facilitate a joint workshop for marketing and engineering to discuss and prioritize features based on these objectives. Use a scoring system to evaluate and rank features, ensuring decisions are transparent and aligned with business goals.

The marketing team may prioritize aligning product features with customer desires and market trends to enhance product appeal and competitive advantage. Conversely, the engineering team focuses on feasibility, cost implications, and time considerations, emphasizing practicality and technical integrity. Your role involves actively listening to both sides, asking probing questions, and distilling core objectives that will guide your decision-making process. For instance, in a recent project, balancing marketing's push for feature richness with engineering's concerns about technical feasibility led to a streamlined feature set that satisfied both teams and met project deadlines effectively.

How is an informed decision with relevance to your customers taken? On one hand features aligning with customer desires and on the other hand the same features representing significant efforts and costs. As the solution provider my objective is to solve customer pain points in a competitive way and thus generate profitable and sustainable sales, grow market share etc. while creating positive impact and complying with rules and regulations. The marketing and the engineering team as experts in their respective domains and I as the decision maker we have our company objectives but making the decision without your customers is negligent. For me point 1 "Understand Needs" is to understand our customers needs in depth and at a granular level.

Concentre-se em encontrar pontos em comum e áreas onde as duas equipes podem colaborar. Se necessário, envolva um terceiro imparcial para ajudar a resolver o conflito

Evaluate the potential impact on customer satisfaction, market competitiveness, and revenue. Gather data from user feedback, market research, and analytics. Prioritize features that offer the greatest benefits and align with business objectives. Facilitate discussions between teams to weigh technical feasibility against market demands. Aim for a balanced solution that maximizes value and supports long-term growth.

What feature at what cost to the customers? Develop with both teams documented scenarios aligned with company objectives capturing feature functionality, cost to the customer (incl. margin and overhead) and delivery timeline. Present and discuss the scenarios based on a questionnaire / interview with customers and ask all important questions wrt. to the preferred option. Determine the critical mass of customers that need to be taken into account to have a representative basis for decision making. This will give you a realistic impact evaluation.

No feature prioritisation without customer interaction. At the end of the day the decision is ours but it takes into account the perspectives of those who pay our bills.