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Northwind Energy: One Quarter, Five Demands

Product Management
medium40 min0 submissions
Goldman Sachs
Scenario

You are the PM for Northwind Energy's renewables platform. You have 9 engineers for a 12-week quarter — roughly 108 engineer-weeks of capacity, before the usual 20-30% goes to support and unplanned work.

Five things are on the table:

A. Enterprise SSO. Blocking $804k of annual contract value across three deals in late-stage procurement. Estimated 10 engineer-weeks.

B. Performance work. The app's slowest screen takes 5s to load. Support cites it as the top complaint. Estimated 11 engineer-weeks.

C. Onboarding redesign. Activation sits at 36%; research suggests a redesign could add 9 points. Estimated 17 engineer-weeks.

D. Platform migration. Technical debt is slowing every team by an estimated 20%. Estimated 29 engineer-weeks.

E. The CEO's feature. The CEO promised a specific customer a custom reporting feature at a conference. 10 engineer-weeks. No other customer has asked for it.

Sales says A. Support says B. Growth says C. Engineering says D. The CEO says E.

Supporting data

risk

enterprise churn risk accounts
2

items

C onboarding
[object Object]
B performance
[object Object]
E ceo feature
[object Object]
A enterprise sso
[object Object]
D platform migration
[object Object]

capacity

weeks
12
engineers
9
gross engineer weeks
108
realistic capacity pct
70
Your task

Set the quarterly roadmap. Provide:

  1. Analysis — how you evaluate and rank these, with your reasoning shown.
  2. Risks — of your choices, including what breaks if you're wrong.
  3. Recommendation — the committed plan, and how you communicate the no's.

You cannot do everything. Be explicit about what you are cutting.

Ready to move forward? Up next: Marlow Chemicals: One Quarter, Five DemandsNext question
How you'll be graded

100 points, 60% to pass.

  • recommendation30
  • framework application25
  • quantitative reasoning25
  • stakeholder management20
Hint
Reveal suggested structure
  1. Real capacity = 108 × ~70% = ~76 engineer-weeks. Planning against gross capacity is the most common roadmap error.
  2. Score consistently — RICE (reach × impact × confidence ÷ effort) or cost of delay ÷ duration.
  3. Convert to money or users where possible; A is already in revenue terms, C can be, B and D are indirect.
  4. Treat D as an investment — it compounds, so delaying it is a growing cost, not a fixed one.
  5. Handle E on its merits, not its source.
  6. Sequence, leave slack, and communicate the trade-offs.