The challenge
During the planning phase for the first release, the team faced an internal challenge around feature prioritization and delivery capacity. Several high-impact features were competing for inclusion in the initial launch, including:
- Real-time local event creation
- Offline navigation support
- Live location sharing for group activities However, the engineering team highlighted capacity constraints due to limited staffing and parallel commitments. Using T-shirt size estimation, it became clear that delivering all features within the planned timeline would introduce significant risk to quality and stability. This created internal tension:
- Design advocated for a richer end-to-end user experience
- Engineering emphasized delivery risk and technical debt
- Product needed to balance user value, feasibility, and timeline
Approach and decision
Used a transparent prioritization method
To resolve this, I facilitated a prioritization discussion grounded in empathy, transparency, and shared goals. Steps taken:
- Acknowledged all perspectives
- Each team’s concerns were openly discussed to ensure everyone felt heard and respected.
- Introduced a prioritization framework
- Features were evaluated using an Impact vs Effort matrix, informed by:
- Persona needs (Katie, Louis, Kesha)
- Contribution to core objectives
- T-shirt size estimates (S / M / L)
- Sought compromise, not elimination
- Instead of discarding features, we:
- Prioritized real-time local events and core discovery flows for the first release
- Moved live location sharing to the next iteration, with clear documentation and rationale 7.Communicated decisions compassionately
- The roadmap was updated transparently, and deferred features were positioned as planned improvements, not deprioritized ideas