S4 Ep. 6 Resource Allocation People Puzzle: How do you decide who goes where?

Are you a product leader who is trying to figure out who on your team is likely to shine in high-risk and low-risk product scenarios?

Are you trying to keep stability among teams and their members so you can accomplish your goals instead of constantly reshuffling who’s working on what?

You’re not alone.

In the sixth episode in our Resource Allocation mini-series we tackle the people puzzle as we answer the question: How do you decide who goes where when you’re allocating resources?

Hope Gurion: Welcome to the Fearless Product Leadership podcast. This is the show for new product leaders seeking to increase their confidence and competence. In every episode, I ask experienced and thoughtful product leaders to share their strategies and tactics that have helped them tackle a tough responsibility of the product leader role. I love helping emerging product leaders shorten their learning curves to expedite their professional success with great products, teams, and stakeholder relationships. I’m your host and CEO of Fearless Product, Hope Gurion.  

One of the reasons I hate having to coach, speak, podcast about this topic and refer to it as a “resource allocation” decision is that while sometimes we’re discussing this in terms of time as a resource, most of the time we’re talking about people, live humans with hopes, aspirations, strengths, gifts, biases, challenges, growth mindsets, fixed mindsets, relationships, business, technology and product-related experiences, constraints and ambitions in their personal lives. The list goes on.  

So let’s say you have now at least a draft or skeleton of how you want to allocate headcount to various existing products or product ideas in exploration. You still have a lot of decisions to make and communicate so in this episode we’re going to discuss:

  • How do you think about identifying who is best suited to which type of product in each lifestage?  

  • How do you approach having those conversations with the individuals you’re considering pairing with these products for their current lifestage? 

  • What reactions might you experience from teams and individuals based on the attention paid to what they’re working on vs other teams’ products in your company?

  • How permanent should you and your teams expect these “resource allocation” assignments to be? 

First Jonathan Bertfield and I discuss some of the considerations to help you determine if you’re getting the right people on the right bus.

Hope Gurion: We talked about the types of people, people who like to explore and love that uncertainty versus people who maybe like to scale and grow and get traction and maybe navigate some of those go-to-market decisions. Are there other mindsets or characteristics that you look for, or how can a leader really have an honest conversation with somebody who maybe hasn't worked in sort of a different stage of a product life cycle product to even know if they're well suited for navigating those decisions at a different product life cycle stage? How do you advise both individuals on a team and leaders to think about who should we put in what seat on this team?

Jonathan Berfield: Yeah. So I've coached an innovation leader in the US Department of Defense for a number of years, and he's amazingly strong in this area, really thinking this through. And he leans a lot on Jim Collins, get the right people on the bus approach, right? Which is let's be really fair and transparent with people about what it is that we're trying to achieve here. This is our vision. This is our strategy that we're going to use to execute against that. And this is the demands that place is, that place is on us as a team and on you as an individual. Let's try that out, right? It doesn't seem like you're totally comfortable there today. Let's do what we can to get you comfortable. If not, let's find another opportunity for you that's appropriate because I don't want to make you miserable. I mean, it doesn't serve my purposes for us to have a person who isn't excited about some of those dynamics. Whether that's ways of working or just kind of the pace that we're going at. All of those things are suited to some people and less suited to others. So let's get the right people on the bus. And sometimes that's going to take six to 12 months to work that out. Who is comfortable? Who is trainable? Who is coachable to become a leader in an innovation capacity? And who just needs to move into another area that's better suited to their skills? Sometimes there's obviously hard decisions there, which is like, “well, you're just not a good fit for our organization. And so let's give you an opportunity to prove that maybe you can change. But if not, let's work that through” and maybe there's some hard decisions to be made, but let's be as transparent and as, um, focused as we can on understanding those dynamics because humans, real people, right? We want to treat them with respect and we want to be treated with respect. So let's talk about it in a way that isn't a kind of out-of-the-blue decision or kind of a person, personality-based decision. It's about what we need as an organization, what you need as an individual to be successful.

Hope Gurion: Yeah. And it reminds me a little bit of like that sort of Wardley mapping where you have like these pioneers or town planners, these sort of constructs for people. And you're right, like some people may just like, I like to explore, I like the uncertainty and I always want to be there. Whereas other people may, depending on where they are in their life and other situations, may want to, you know, maybe having done some pioneer work might want to move into some sort of settling or town planning type work. Like it really can vary based on the individual, the product, the company, where they are. So I don't, I at least I like the framing of it, but I also think it's fluid based on the individual. Do you have any other ways of framing people to help them think about where they might be best suited?

Jonathan Bertfield: Well, look, I've done some work recently with a company in a pretty highly regulated space. And one of the things that we talk about in the context of innovation and certainly those early areas of running experiments and learning rapidly and translating those and sometimes pivoting and kind of that agility that is built into those early teams. It demands taking some risks and being a little scrappy and not always having every T crossed and I dotted. And sometimes that's a real challenge to the nature of people who are on the teams, right? They're just not comfortable with the idea of taking the risk, right? They feel like it's a personal affront to everything that they've learned and got them to where they are today, right? And so that's a really important thing to recognize. How can we make sure that A, they're not slowing down the team, and B, they're not just sitting there really unhappy the whole time? So, I think it's recognizing those signals, reacting to them, and making sure that you're thinking about that balance between team organization success and individual career path.


Hope Gurion: Next Troy Anderson and I discuss that even when you believe you’ve put the right people on the right teams for a product and its life stage, you may encounter suspicion or resentment from teams who feel that another team is receiving more internal or executive attention for what they’re working on.

Hope Gurion: When you think about, you know, who to put on what type of product and you, you mentioned sort of the best or the most if they're, if it's really sort of at the center of the bullseye versus, you know, who, who might be working on something that's maybe got a bit more, it's not as central to the company. 

I think people who are working on the most important priorities tend to feel really great that they're working on the most important priorities. And then the people who are working on that tertiary or further from center products or priorities might feel slighted or that might be an incentive to look around. So how do you approach that as a leader thinking about who do I put on the products that are very, very important and strategic versus the ones that are, we don't want them to fail, but they're not really in the center of the bullseye? How do you navigate those decisions and message that to people?

Troy Anderson: Well, and it's even worse than that because oftentimes I've had people working on the center of the bullseye who are part of the, you know, whole ball of wax, um, believe that they weren't important because they didn't get mentioned enough to all-hands meeting, right? “Oh, we're going to try this thing over here and we're going to try this thing with AI” and, “oh, the company just likes AI and they, they've forgotten about us.”

Really? So you're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't. And the key is, does everyone understand where their place is, not from the standpoint of position or role, but does everyone understand that we're trying to make this go as a portfolio of things? And can I explain properly to the folks in the middle of the circle and the folks on the exterior, you know, either the lights going out on a thing or we're trying to create light on a thing on the exterior? Whereas the thing in the center is the thing that pays for all of our salaries. Often I'd say it's the team that's in the center making people's salaries is where you find the most people upset because they feel like they're not part of the new thing or they're not part of, I mean, the people who are being in the sunset of projects, yes, the feeling is always not particularly great. So again, that's why, you know, moving it to contractors is always a great, great move once you've made the decision. But yeah, I would say I've seen the mix. So I've seen a mix of people that are most vital to the company not appreciated because they're just part of the regular, normal course of business. Of course, the normal course of business is the thing that pays the salaries.

Hope Gurion: Got it, Yeah, I do think sometimes there is a more attention allocation to the more new, explore, innovation things that are still quite unproven. And it can feel like that's where the attention is going and maybe I should be there. And I think that's why it is helpful as a leader to help members of the product and design, engineering organization get, have the perspective of working on products at all stages of the life cycle because they do have different value contributions, except for maybe the sunset. So I hear your point on moving it to contractors at that point unless it's moving into some sort of reimagining of whatever that product was. If it's like the way we used to do it is terrible and we wanna reimagine it, then it kind of transitions to maybe a new innovation initiative.

Troy Anderson: That's right. Yeah, no. You know, having worked in health care where fax is still a thing, where printed directories are still a thing, I can assure you that those teams that work on faxes or work on printing giant directories, that's the best, where faxes are still a thing, different industries are still a thing. That’s not a feeling of “I'm working on the future.” Right? That said, to the extent that you can automate things, to the extent that you can productize things, to the extent where you can, you know, auto-publish a directory or you can figure out a way to systematically figure out a fax. There are still problems to solve that are very cool. And there are still problems to solve that, that can, you know, get you out of that job of maintaining that thing that is kind of more old world. Um, that can be a huge success.

So as a product leader, when you’re making these resource allocation choices and setting up new teams or reorganizing teams to align people, their skills and time with the most important outcomes, how permanent or durable should you expect these assignments and teams to be?

Hope Gurion: If you’re a product leader whose organization is set up to achieve outcomes instead of project delivery, you already know why durable teams are usually more effective than project teams that spin up and disband. This is often referred to as teams of missionaries vs mercenaries. But how durable are these teams likely to be in reality? We don’t expect people to stay in one job at one company for the rest of their lives so we know that durability doesn’t mean permanent, forever and ever. So how do you approach how consistent or flexible a product’s dedicated team members should be?  

Adrian Howard, Troy Anderson and I discuss philosophies related team flexibility vs durability next: First we’ll hear from Adrian:

Hope Gurion: One more thing I wanted to clarify, because we talked a lot about the relationship between the outcomes for the product at that, whatever that moment in time is and the team composition. And I want to explore that as it relates to having durable teams where the outcomes could change over time. So if you set the outcomes to drive the team composition, you may not have as durable a team. So tell me how you think about the relationship between defining the outcomes and the durability of the team based on where the product is and its maturity.

Adrian Howard: Um, all the hard questions. Um, let me think for a second. The places where that team continuity works for me is often when the thing the team values is, as it were, the, the mission of the product, as it were, or the value that it provides the customers. I've seen people do those transitions from quite early like the care home thing that the people who were working on that, that care home software, were deeply passionate about the problem space, they'd all had family members that they'd had to care for, or had, you know, had people who'd gone through the care home system, they saw issues and problems with that. They all wanted this thing to be fixed and be improved and that core team stayed from early development right through to the maintained stage and with an element of growth in there some of those people. came out into more kind of staff engineer roles, sort of think staff principal positions in an organization, some of those people, you know, career progressed into management or did some slight switches from things to UX into product and stuff like that, but generally that team either, you know, either stayed or had career progression across the product during its growth. Other organizations aren't built that way. You know, I've got another client who works for a very, very large org, who has a massive product portfolio, huge chunks of that have been purchases, there's no real overarching value system that everybody at the org has bought into and they're much more like I'm you know mercenary about it for want of a better term like this is this is the thing that I want to do where in this org can I do that thing that I want to do And then there's much more variety in the kinds of teams that work. You know, there are some teams who are passionate about this particular product area and stay there. There are some other teams where people are kind of broken up and reformed over time. There are some teams that have a small core that is working on the product longer term, who bring in small kind of, you know, two or three person groups or pods to work on a kind of, oh, we don't understand this thing and it has UX-y stuff in it, so we'll get a user researcher and a designer and a product person to work in parallel with the dev team for a bit to figure out this thing. So yeah, to me it's about understanding the people and their motivations and then getting that to align with whatever the company is trying to do.

Hope Gurion: Got it. So it sounds like more flexibility in those team structures based on the sort of needs of the product and the organization's expectations of the value that product's going to contribute over time.

Adrian Howard: Yeah

Hope Gurion: And the interests and passions and you know the things that the people like to do so that you find that win-win between the individuals on the team and what the organization is hoping to see in terms of impact of those products.

Adrian Howard: And there are always going to be trade-offs in that. You know, there are always going to be like the person who's passionate about the thing is maybe slightly less good at the thing. And the person who is good at the thing is maybe a little less passionate about the product. And, you know, the group who, you know, the team that is really good at legacy system that sunset product thing is built on which is like a thing that happens so much which just makes me angry and sad but likely you know the group of you know, very experienced, very good at their job, people are given the legacy sunset product that supports a big chunk of the org because they're the only people who have the skills to keep this thing running, which is A, they're the most valuable people in the organization, the most highly skilled people in the organization, and they're given the absolute worst job, as it were, while less experienced people are given the fun new thing to play with, which as good as it could be because the best people aren't working on it and the best people in the org are currently hating their job and putting their resumes out because they're working on this old legacy product which the organization explicitly doesn't value.

Hope Gurion: Right, right, yes. And I love that you bring that up because that is time and time again, I see that happening where just because they have the knowledge, we basically put them in a dead end, no-win situation where like, it almost forces them to, unless you've got some sort of retention plan in place, which often companies have to resort to that, those people are already seeking opportunities where their skills and knowledge will be valued because clearly it's not valued. There's no bridge being built to “while you're transitioning this thing, let's give you opportunities to create growth within the organization.” Such a common miss.

Adrian Howard: Or even just acknowledging that this thing is... I mean, I think even just acknowledging that this thing is happening is often the most basic simple step that can help solve that. It's like acknowledge and then, “hey, you're working on a rubbish thing, but it's, we know you are, and it's our fault, we fucked up.” And give them a timeline. you know, like this is going to be for the next four months while we do other thing, you know, and, you know, telling them the truth and building trust can go so much to actually kind of making that, that painful at risk team, something that's going to kind of stick around for another six, 18 months to, to help you through that process and then get, get them working on something which they're going to actually providing serious value to both themselves and the organization.

Hope Gurion: Now Troy Anderson shares his philosophy on enabling individuals on his teams to rotate in and out of roles, even if they’re working on critically important products in Invest or Maintain, which he refers to as “center of the bullseye” in terms of criticality to a company.

Hope Gurion: I'd love to understand a little bit more about how you think about durable teams associated with center of the bullseye or close to center of the bullseye versus this concept of maybe being on rotation so that you're mitigating the risk or maybe cross-training, in the case of giving different experiences to people. I feel like that's a tension in terms of philosophy. Is it better to have durable teams for certain products at certain stages or certain levels of priority or risk vs. having teams be able to jump around and experience lots of different products? So how do you think about when it makes sense to have a durable team versus when you think about making it very rotational?

Troy Anderson: From my standpoint, it's always better to have rotations because people change, right? Um, my situation changed and now I need to move and we're not a hybrid or remote-only company. So, you know, Joe has to go and move across the country and we're not set up to do remote. That's not anything having to do with the company that that's just how people are um, you know, someone wins the lottery or someone wants to take a break or someone needs to take a sabbatical, or you know, I had one employee who was like, “hey, my wife and I are thinking of having kids, so before we do that, we want to sail around the world.” I'm like, “what? What are you going to do?” You know, so you can talk about durability and mean it, but the reality is you have to be, you have to be able to change. And if you don't prepare for change, then when change comes, you're worse off. So my bias is on towards rotation versus durable techniques. The reality is oftentimes you're gonna take a luxury doing the rotation. And so there is that tension, but if given my druthers, I'd much prefer rotations.

Hope Gurion: And so then let me ask you how, with a rotational approach, how do you address the risk of deep understanding of customers, the competition, you know, that continuity of even understanding what's been explored before, team dynamics and high-performing teams. So tell me a little bit more about how you balance the flexibility of rotation with the continuity of durable teams.

Troy Anderson: Right. Well, a lot of that goes to don't rotate everyone all at once, right? So oftentimes, if you're rotating everyone all at once, then you're really in a bad situation. So the ideal sort of rotation is you've cross-pollinated. And so for engineering rotations, it's, you know, if you're pairing, if you're pair programming and people are getting up to speed on the code base. You know, that's like an ideal situation for a rotation because now everyone knows the code base and if someone wants to take a vacation, the code base can keep going. So you're always in this kind of strange position of, how do I keep the product moving? How do I keep the people moving? Those are two different things. One way you're making money, another way you're keeping the people that make the money go.

And so, you know, to the extent that you can do this sort of pairing, to do this sort of sharing, it's not a thing that you can just wholesale change. “Okay, team B, you're gonna now work on A, and A, you're gonna work on B.” Doesn't work like that. So it has to be componentized. And likewise, if you have, you know, a skill that isn't known by someone, but someone wants to learn that skill, then it might be a while before they could even rotate to take the place of someone who knows it really well. That said, it's a fantastic opportunity for that. Let's say I'm a product manager, and I want to learn more about data science. If you really value this person as a product manager and you want them to have the ability to do data science, then put them on a data science thing, right? Don't work on the operations thing anymore. But they may not be up to speed quickly. So that's a luxury of resources.

And I think, you know, we're all well aware that we typically don't always have that luxury, but that's the goal.

Hope Gurion: The way I think about this is: I want a durable team that works well together. And if they're not working well together, I want the flexibility to rotate people, whether people do that voluntarily or not. But I also want people to have new experiences. So I think there's always a natural rotation in. But I wouldn't want people switching from project to project. I'd want them to have some, even if they rotate in, we're going you know, some period of time, six months, a year, something like that, where we get that continuity so that it's not like, “oh, I didn't jive with them for the last two weeks, so I'm ready to move on to something else.” So I don't know how you think about that. Do you have any like guardrails around those rotations that people have to keep in mind?

Troy Anderson: Yeah, well, I am ruthless for people that are flighty, right? I don't tolerate it in the slightest. So if I've decided that I'm going to rotate some people onto a project, I rotate them onto the project. And then the first thing they do is start poo-pooing, I'm going to yank them off the team. I'm going to send them back to Siberia. It's just like sunsetting a project. If you don't have the proper respect, it's not going to work. And also the respect for rotation and the respect for what we're doing. You can't be flighty about those things.


Hope Gurion: I’m going to share my perspective on how to think about who should go on what types of teams because I don’t think we got into enough in these discussions with my guests. This is assuming you’re reallocating existing people in your organization vs hiring from the outside. Keep in mind that it will be rare for you to identify a single individual with most of these skills and that even this list is partial and imperfect. As a leader, you’re looking to create, support, and empower a balanced cross-functional team capable of achieving its desired outcomes.  

So next you’re going to hear me share my advice on characteristics to build into a product team working on a product in each of these lifestages. In the transcript of this episode, I’ve provided more than 50 interview questions to help you and potential members of your team assess who likely has the right experience and mindset for a team working on a product at each stage.

My preference is for a reasonably durable team made up of full-time employees with a vested interest in the success of the products and company in each of these scenarios.

Explore stage:

High comfort with uncertainty: We need someone who can stay calm and collected under pressure and decipher signals from noise. 

  • Tell me about a time when you thrived despite the unknown. 

  • Tell me about a time when you had to make critical decisions with imperfect information. 

Exceptional at identifying risky assumptions: We need someone motivated to avoid costly mistakes. 

  • Tell me about a time when you’ve been burned by a risky assumption.  

  • Tell me about a time when you identified and mitigated risks before over-investing in a plan. 

Experienced with a variety of assumption testing methods and experiment design: We need someone who can help us make evidence-based decisions.

  • Tell me about a recent experiment you ran to test an assumption.

  • What would be your approach to test whether this assumption is true [provide example assumption]? 

Great at connecting value propositions with potential target customer segments: We need someone who can help us build products and services that a sizable segment of customers love and are willing to pay for.

  • Tell me about a time when you developed potential value propositions for a target customer. 

  • Tell me how you’ve identified critical needs among potential customers.

  • Tell me about a time when you’ve evaluated available budget and likelihood of paying for a new product or service. 

Understands your company’s business model and core competencies: We need someone who can help us make decisions that are aligned with our overall business strategy. 

  • How does our company make money? 

  • Can you describe our unique strengths, core competencies and defensible, competitive advantages? 

Doesn’t fall in love easily, bias for objective decision making/rigor: We have many ideas and we’re trying to find the one that will be the most impactful for our customers and company.  

  • How have you found evidence to avoid over-committing to a low-value idea? 

  • How have you balanced intuition with data and analysis when making decisions?

Preference for speed, directional > perfect research: We need someone who can move quickly and make decisions without getting bogged down in analysis paralysis. 

  • How do you balance the need for speed with the need for rigor when making decisions? 

  • Tell me about a time when you had to decide quickly without all the information you needed. 

  • How do you decide which research efforts to use to ensure that you are gathering the most pertinent information in the shortest amount of time?

Invest-early days

Able to create and communicate a clear vision: We need someone who can set a clear direction for our team and company. 

  • Can you describe a time when you had to create and communicate a clear vision for a project or team? 

  • How do you ensure that your vision is aligned with the organization's goals? 

  • How do you communicate your vision in a way that inspires and motivates others? 

  • Tell me about a time when you painted a picture of what's possible and got others excited about it? 

Form and norm high-performing teams: We need someone who can build a team that can achieve ambitious goals. 

  • Tell me about a time when you created a culture of trust, collaboration, and accountability? 

  • What are your strategies for building trust and collaboration among team members? 

  • How have you course-corrected when your team wasn’t performing?

Able to build iteratively: We need someone who can build our product one step at a time, without sacrificing quality. 

  • Tell me about a time when you learned from your mistakes and adapted quickly.

  • Tell me about a time when you delivered incredible results under pressure. 

  • Tell me about a time when you thin-sliced a large solution concept into smaller increments that would help you deliver value sooner.

Can cultivate reference customers: We need someone who can help us build a strong customer base that will help us grow our business. 

  • Tell me about a time when you turned customers into advocates. 

  • Tell me about a time when you uncovered a prospect’s criteria to switch from their existing solution to a new solution. 

  • Tell me about a time when you uncovered a customer’s success criteria to remain a loyal customer?

  • Tell me about a time when you discovered that a prospective customer was not an ideal fit for your product.

Strong relationships with customer-facing teams (sales, support) and business teams (legal, finance): We need someone who can help us operate smoothly and efficiently as a company even as we experience inevitable growing pains. 

  • Tell me about a time when you’ve fostered relationships and collaborated effectively with people even when the road is rocky. 

  • Tell me about a time when you aligned people to make progress on a problem even if the solution wasn’t perfect.

Ability to negotiate and achieve meaningful measures of success for the team’s work, aka outcomes:

  • Tell me about a time when you effectively negotiated for a measure of success your team was motivated to achieve.

  • Tell me how you determined that was the right way to measure your team’s value.

  • Tell me how you evaluated your progress toward that goal.


Invest scaling

Creates predictability not chaos: We need a predictable cadence of activities including releases, communications, decisions, and measuring impact. 

  • Tell me about a time when you worked on a team that was/wasn’t releasing value predictably. 

  • How have you kept your leaders and stakeholders informed about problems to solve and the impact of solutions released?

  • Tell me about a time when you responded to unforeseen problems with your product quickly and effectively?

Able to align on priorities: With more teams contributing to our success and more stakeholders with input, we need people who can clearly communicate their prioritization methodology and create buy-in. 

  • Tell me about a time when you successfully aligned a team or group of people on priorities. 

  • How do you go about understanding the priorities of different stakeholders? 

  • What are your strategies for building consensus and getting everyone aligned on the same goals?

Team specialization with strong cross-team collaboration: We want to have teams of specialists who can work together effectively to achieve common goals. 

  • Tell me about a time when you successfully collaborated with a team outside of your own to achieve a common goal. 

  • What challenges have you encountered when collaborating with a team with a different goal, priority, or process?  

  • How did you solve those challenges?

Prefers to make small, incremental improvements over taking big risks: With more customers at stake and more teams working on the product, changes are often smaller and more certain. 

  • Tell me about a time when you successfully made a series of small, incremental improvements that added up to a significant impact. 

  • Can you give an example of how you’ve approached gentle deployment?

Comfortable with creating and working within a process: Prefers teams and processes with clear roles, responsibilities, and workflows. 

  • Tell me about a time when you had to create a RACI or DACI.  

  • When have you felt there was not enough process or too much process for a team to operate effectively?

Sustain

“Quality is job one” mindset: Takes pride in maintaining high-quality products and services that customers can rely on.  

  • Tell me about a time when you triaged and prioritized among a set of bugs or incompatibilities.  

  • How have you approached resolving an unforeseen issue quickly?

Eye for efficiency: Constantly seeking ways to reduce our operating costs. 

  • What are some of your strategies for identifying waste?

  • How do you decide which processes should be automated and which should stay manual? 

Sunset

Strong project management skills: 

  • Tell me about a time when you managed multiple projects simultaneously to meet deadlines. 

  • How do you keep track of all the details of a project, including tasks, resources, and risks?

Strong attention to detail: 

  • Tell me about a time when you identified and fixed problems before they caused major issues. 

  • How do you organize your work and communications to ensure they are thorough? 

Excellent relationship skills to navigate internal and customer difficulties for whatever lies ahead: Able to build and maintain relationships with people from different expertise and with different levels of seniority. 

  • Tell me about a time you resolved an internal conflict. 

  • Tell me about a time when you built trust and rapport with others.

Pessimistic > optimistic: Errs on the side of taking a pessimistic approach to planning. 

  • How have you approached surfacing what could go wrong in a situation? 

  • Tell me about a time when something went wrong with a project and what you did about it.  

  • Tell me about a time when you had to create a plan to minimize disruption. 

In the transcript, you’ll find about 50 interview questions you can use to evaluate individuals in your organization against these attributes as you work to place people into product teams by life stage.

In the next and final episode, we’ll discuss what some of the antipatterns are that you’ll want to watch out for as you make your resource allocation choices.

If you’re a product leader seeking to fearlessly lead your product teams through resource allocation decisions, I’d love to be of help. Please reach out on LinkedIn or send me an email to hope@fearless-product.com. I’ll respond with an FAQ about my coaching programs and a link to sign up for a free mini-coaching session about a challenge you’re facing.

Fearless Product: confidence through evidence.

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S4 Ep. 7: Resource Allocation Antipatterns: What can go wrong?

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S4 Ep. 5 Making the Tough Choices: How do you develop your initial Resource Allocation plan?