Product practice · Engineering priorities
Product operating model
From feature factory to intentional, lasting choices
Why this mattered.
Feature requests and bug reports arrived as isolated demands. Internal stakeholders interrupted developers directly, and the most forceful request could determine what happened next.
The opportunity was to protect developers’ focus while making priorities, trade-offs and expectations clearer for the whole business.
What I owned.
- Intake & delivery priorities
The CTO championed the initial move towards a more structured operating model. I drove the hands-on implementation, defining how requests and bugs were handled and introducing structured intake, severity-based triage, regular reviews and clearer organisation in Jira and day-to-day engineering priorities.
- Alignment & lasting solutions
I established biweekly conversations with customer support, finance, revenue management, and the product organisation responsible for the company’s product direction, as well as other teams. I connected overlapping requests and encouraged architectural discussions before coding, helping teams address root causes rather than repeat patches.
What made it challenging.
- Prioritisation & trade-offs
Prioritisation had to balance technical health and debt, critical incidents, established business needs, newer initiatives and smaller improvements.
- Trust & influence
The work also required building trust in a more structured approach. My role was to create useful clarity without adding unnecessary process, exercising influence without being the developers’ formal line manager.
What changed.
More focus. Better alignment.
Developers received clearer, prioritised work and reported fewer interruptions, greater focus, stronger alignment on architecture and fewer rollbacks. Business teams recognised how shared structure helped everyone, supporting more realistic expectations and better-informed decisions.
These are qualitative improvements within an ongoing organisational shift.