Working when resources are constrained

• Sukanya Bharati
• August 21, 2024
• Blog
• #founders, #productmanagement, #startups
• 0 Comments

“Do more with less”. This is a “mantra” you will hear in time of economic uncertainty. It applies to big companies and #startups. Maybe more so with startups, because most are already resource constrained.

There are a lot of things that #productmanagers and #founders can do.

Arguably the most important thing is to prioritize. This is not just about what you do first, but also about taking off the list what you should NOT be doing. This applies as much to product scope as it does to overall startup activities.

There are many frameworks and models out there that you can use. But most of them don’t work well when you have a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty. Gathering data of course helps, but that is complementary to judgement.

Some factors to consider are:

– What is the cost of building out the scope for next 3-6 months?

– Should the order of work be changed based on changing market conditions?

– What is overall GTM strategy supporting – retention, acquisition?

– What will help you extend your runway if you are running low on funds?

These are in addition to the standard ones such as:

Dev cost and complexity, resource allocation and availability, technical skills, sharing work across issues fixing/current customer asks and new capability building, executive/sale push, does doing the work provide competitive differentiation…

Always look at the scope/roadmap as an ever evolving document or list.