Conflicting Product Requirements
How do you resolve conflicting product requirements? What or who determines which requirement takes the hit?
Think about what you’d do if this situation came up in the real world. What are the main questions & concerns you’d have?
As this is a cross-functional collaboration question, make sure to consider your stakeholders. How do you get their input? How do you manage their needs?
Walk through your process for making sense of the situation, engaging with your team to find the best approach, and then executing on that approach.
Did you consider how to get the necessary context about the requirements?
Did you consider your stakeholders? How you manage them will be an important aspect of your answer.
Did you consider challenges & risks to watch out for? Do you have examples of similar situations you can draw on? These can help you show off your experience as a PM.
Every PM has their own approach to managing these situations, so your answer may vary. However, there are important considerations that it would be useful to talk through with the interviewer.
Resolving this kind of conflict is a process that the PM should own. At a high level, we’ll need to get context on the situation, engage with stakeholders to figure out a solution, and then move forward in the chosen direction.
My goal as a PM is to ensure the success of the product.
First, we need to get context. We’ll want to understand:
- why a conflict exists in the first place,
- who are the stakeholders involved and why this is important to them,
- if there are any possible alternatives.
In the best case, we can find a solution that makes everyone happy for minimal work. If not, starting these conversations with our stakeholders lays the groundwork for finding alignment down the line.
If we can’t find an easy solution, we need to consider the relative importance of the requirements. As a PM, the bias is usually towards whichever feature is more important to the product's long-term success. However, there could be urgent short-term considerations or considerations around the effort required. Both our own sense of the product and what we learn from stakeholders will be important here.
Staying in regular communication with stakeholders about this process will be important. As solutions begin to take shape, involving our stakeholders in the process will help us find better approaches and make them feel more comfortable with whatever direction we choose.
The main challenge here is that a stakeholder might be disappointed, even if we involve them in the process. There’s a possibility that they escalate in order to drive their needs.
Once a direction is set, the team executes on it. At this point, the team should be aligned on the direction. However, don’t be surprised if the need we deprioritized pops up again elsewhere. Its importance could grow as the product develops or user needs change. It can be useful to keep track of previous discussions & decisions to refer back to in the future.
As a product manager, you should first assess the situation by gathering information from stakeholders and users to understand each requirement's priority and assess each solution's impact. You should then create a roadmap or plan to ensure that all requirements are addressed efficiently and effectively. Finally, you would communicate the plan to stakeholders for approval and implementation. This mock interview with an Affirm product manager outlines some strategies for dealing with conflicting requirements.
Assuming I am a PM for company X and my current task for the morning is resolving a new conflicting product requirement.
First I would like to inquire more about the product and about the conflict.
Product: Assuming I am new and I didn’t already know what the product was, what is our product's value proposition to our customers? How does our product align with our company's goals? What does success look like for our product? Have we been successful in the past? Who are our customers?
Conflict: What are the conflicting product requirements specifically? Are we seeing conflict across various stakeholders? Are we seeing conflict on the customer side? Does the conflict have to do specifically with timing or deadlines? How soon does this conflict need to be resolved?
To answer these questions I may have to speak with Sales, Engineering + Data Scientists and Leadership.
Let's say that various engineers are conflicting about how to implement the product we are set to launch in the next quarter. Since we are set to launch in the next quarter, resolving this swiftly will be in your best interest.
To begin the resolution I would speak with my TechLead and the other engineers in question. I would like to hear both propositions (assuming there are only two) to how our product should be implemented. I would pose a few questions for all conflicting parties, How does your solution fall in line with our business objectives? How does your solution provide more value to our customers? I would also want to lightly cost both options and understand how they differ.
It's possible at this stage it is clear which option we should proceed with.
For the sake of this exercise let's assume we are at a stalemate and still have not been able to make a decision.
Scenarios: Option 1 will provide more value to customers but will not be ready for launch in the next quarter as we predicted Option 2 will be ready for launch in the next quarter but the value proposition is significantly lower.
Assuming we have laid out both options in a clear manner, attached metric estimations like value add for user retention or possibly % increase in adoption and have rough time estimations, I would pull in our company’s context to make the final decision.
Is our company in its early stages and looking for lots of growth fast? Option 2 might be a more viable option as we can continue to iterate on our existing product while customers are using it - possibly increasing its value as we can take in input early on from our users.
Are we a mature product looking to increase customer satisfaction? Option 1 would be more viable in this case as we have a stable amount of DAUs and want to make sure we are giving them quality products to interact with.
Are we looking to increase our margins and bring in more revenue? This line of questioning would continue until it was very obvious which option would best suit our company at our current state.
If for whatever reason no obvious option arose, I would set a meeting with Leadership. During this meeting I would present all options, present my suggestion and explain why. I would look for any objections and answer any questions.