Rank Sales, Ops and Competitive-Gap Requests Against ARR and a 10% Opex Cut

You are a product manager about to reset the priorities in your backlog after hearing from a panel of internal stakeholders. Your product line's north-star metric is annual recurring revenue (ARR). This fiscal year the company has also made operational efficiency a key focus, with a goal of cutting operating expenses by 10%. Three stakeholders have each brought you something: - **Director of Sales**: asks for a new feature that would raise the win rate on deals with new customers and generate additional add-on revenue from existing customers, and says the team cannot hit its bookings quota for the year without it. - **Director of Operations**: asks for a feature that automates a set of manual tasks the operations department performs today, backed by a detailed analysis showing it could improve the department's overhead by 2%. - **VP of Marketing**: shares a win/loss report showing a new competitor turning up in a growing number of deals. Every one of those deals has been lost because your product cannot match one key feature the competitor offers. How would you prioritize these requests? Give your ranking and explain how you reached it. ```hint Put the requests on the same scale Compare what each request does for ARR and for the cost goal, and how strong the evidence behind each claim is. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - What are the rough engineering effort and timeline for each of the three features, and can any of them be built in parallel? - Is the key feature the competitor wins on related to what the Director of Sales is asking for, or are they separate capabilities? - How much revenue is in the deals where the new competitor appears, and is the competitor also putting renewals in the existing customer base at risk? - Does the 10% operating-expense goal apply to the whole company, to this product line or to the operations department, and what share of that spend does the operations department account for? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Tying each request to the two stated goals: ARR as the north star and the 10% operating-expense reduction. - Weighing the quality of evidence behind each request: an assertion about quota, a quantified analysis, and a win/loss trend. - A consistent comparison of impact, confidence, effort and urgency that leads to an explicit ranking. - Checking whether the requests overlap before treating them as separate bets. - How the decision is communicated to each stakeholder, and what new information would change the ranking. ### Follow-up Questions - Engineering says closing the competitive gap will take far longer than the sales feature. Does your ranking change? - The Director of Sales escalates to your VP, saying your ranking guarantees a missed quota. How do you respond? - One quarter later, how would you check whether your ranking was the right call?