Allocating One Engineer-Week Among Conflicting Enterprise Customer Asks

You have one engineer for one week, and several enterprise customers are each pressing for something different. How would you decide what that engineer works on? ```hint Not every ask competes equally Before comparing accounts, ask what kind of request each one is and what happens if it waits a week. Some may not need the engineer at all. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - What kinds of requests are these: a defect in a deployment that is live with the customer's own users, a missing integration that blocks a launch, or a new capability? - Has anything already been promised to any of these customers, through a contract, an agreed go-live date or a renewal conversation? - Do any requests overlap, so that one change could serve more than one customer? - Is the single engineer a hard limit, or can solutions, support or configuration work absorb some of the asks? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A triage step that separates live customer-facing breakage and existing commitments from new feature asks before any ranking by account - Explicit criteria for the remaining requests, such as severity, revenue at risk, how many customers benefit, fit within one week and roadmap alignment, and how they are weighed - Realistic scoping of a single engineer-week: focus versus splitting the engineer, and time for testing and release - How customers whose requests wait are handled: workarounds, dates and coordination with their account owners - The risk of building one-off work for a single large account at the expense of the product ### Follow-up Questions - Your largest account and a much smaller one both report something broken in production on the same morning. What does the engineer do first? - A sales leader says a prospect will sign this quarter only if their request ships this week. How does that change your plan? - By Friday the top item is only half finished. What do you tell that customer, and what happens next week?