Ranking competing asks from several stakeholder teams with limited capacity
Company: Boston Consulting Group
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product / Decision Making
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Several teams bring you requests at the same time, and together they add up to more than you and your team can deliver. How would you decide which requests to take on, and in what order?
```hint Start from the goal
Before ranking anything, find out what problem each team is trying to solve and what your own team is measured on this period.
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### Clarifying Questions
- Are these requests for changes to a product I own, or for my team's time on work owned by others?
- Do the requests come only from internal teams such as sales, support and other product teams, or also from customers and partners?
- Is there an agreed goal or roadmap for this period to rank against, or would I need to set one?
- Would you like the process I would follow, or an example of a time I had to do this?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- How requests are gathered and understood before ranking, including the need behind each one
- Explicit ranking criteria tied to goals, with effort, dependencies and deadlines factored in
- How disagreements between teams are settled or escalated
- How decisions are communicated and revisited, especially with the teams whose requests wait
- A concrete example that shows the process working
### Follow-up Questions
- A senior executive's request ranks low on your criteria. What do you do?
- Two requests tie, and you can staff only one this quarter. How do you break the tie?
- How do you handle a team that keeps re-raising a request you have deferred?
Overview: A product manager interview question on prioritizing competing requests that arrive from several teams at once. It tests whether the candidate can set clear criteria tied to goals, weigh impact, effort and deadlines, settle conflicts between stakeholders, and communicate decisions to the teams whose requests wait.