PM Quest · Practice cases · Learning resources

Deprioritizing a Championed Feature

Behavioral · intermediate

Describe a situation where you had to deprioritize a feature you were deeply invested in, and how you navigated the change in direction with your team and stakeholders.

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Community approaches

Pavlo’s approach

The team was working on AI objects recognition feature under my leadership for a while. The feature development took a lot of effort of all team members. Unfortunately, the funding for the project was stopped and we had to shift our focus towards other tasks. First of all I got information from higher management why the funding was stopped and what are new priorities. Then I communicated the reason to the team, explaining that all the effort they put into development isn't useless. We need to preserve the project and extract some pieces of it for future developments. Also, I presented fresh priorities as exciting things to work on together as a good formed team. Finally, I communicated the updates to all stakeholders explaining the reason of the changes and plans for the future, considering their feedback on gathered knowledge and learnings.