Product Manager: prioritize refactoring over new features
AnthroposLumen's rapid growth has led to platform instability and security risks.
Business stakeholders prioritize new features, while engineers warn of mounting technical debt and system vulnerabilities.
Your goal is to convince stakeholders to prioritize platform refactoring alongside feature development.
Your Role
You are a Senior Product Manager at Lumen, a fast-growing fintech startup.
Other participants
Context
Convince business stakeholders to prioritize major platform refactoring over new features.
Lumen is a rapidly growing fintech startup delivering innovative financial solutions like AI-driven financial analytics and real-time payment processing. With a 150% increase in active users, reaching 2 million, and transaction volumes surging to $1.5 billion monthly, Lumen has seen significant growth. However, rapid feature deployment has led to platform stability issues, including a major system outage and a high-profile security breach. The development team of 15 engineers faces challenges with technical debt, unpatched vulnerabilities, and inefficient database schemas. To maintain its competitive edge against companies like Stripe and PayPal, Lumen must balance new feature development with addressing technical debt, ensuring platform stability, and enhancing security measures.
Your main challenge is to convince key business stakeholders to prioritize platform refactoring over new feature development. The recent launch of "Instant Loan Approvals" has increased technical debt, causing performance issues and system outages. While the engineering team emphasizes the need for refactoring to prevent data loss and downtime, business stakeholders focus on growth through new features and market expansion. You must navigate these complexities, balancing immediate feature demands with the critical need to address technical debt, ensuring platform stability and supporting long-term growth.
As a Senior Product Manager at Lumen, you will manage product development, prioritize tasks, and ensure platform stability while balancing new feature demands. You will interact with key team members and stakeholders, including David Park, a Senior Engineer concerned about technical debt, and Samantha Lee, a Business Stakeholder focused on growth. Reporting to Rachel Kim, the Director of Product Management, you will evaluate the platform's current state, identify critical areas of technical debt, create visual aids to communicate risks, and develop a balanced action plan addressing both technical debt and feature development.
To complete the simulation, you need to:
- Conduct a risk assessment of the platform's current state and projected growth.
- Visualize and communicate the identified risks to stakeholders using visual aids and presentations.
- Propose a balanced action plan that addresses both technical debt and feature development.
Once you are done, compile your findings into a clear, well-organized report highlighting key risks, action plans, and supporting visuals. Save the document as a Collaborative Document, and send it to your manager, Rachel Kim.