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Workday: Prioritizing AI Growth vs. Global Data Compliance

Feature Prioritization · intermediate

You're the Lead PM for Workday's enterprise recruiting platform. Your Sales VP is pushing hard for a new 'AI-powered candidate sourcing' feature, claiming it will unlock major new Q3 deals and boost revenue by 15%. Simultaneously, your Legal counsel warns that prioritizing anything over critical data privacy and compliance updates for upcoming global regulations (like CCPA 2.0) puts the company at severe risk. How do you navigate this intense stakeholder conflict and prioritize for the next quarter?

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Community approaches

Pavlo’s approach

First of all we need to clarify what are the company's goal for the current period (year) - Do we aim to increase revenue by the EOY? For how much? How far are we from the goal? Second we need to understand finances - What's current financial situation? Do we have enough money for a steady growth and achieving our goals?

Next, we should break down the requests by smaller implementation chunks. What are the minimum requirements for the Sales VP to unlock the deals? - We might be able prepare some foundation for that. For instance we can prepare some features announcements and add components-placeholders which will help to secure the position of AI-powered product which will unveil its full power soon. On the other side - what are the requirements from the legal team? - We might be able to do some quick tweaks to comply with data privacy regulations and get ready for CCPA, but not fully implement all required changes.

And the most important - what's the risk of postponing the legal warnings?

At the end we do an evaluation of two things - if legal risks are high and can put the whole company under critical risk and there are no workarounds to comply quickly, then we prioritize the legal changes. However, if 15% revenue growth is also critical or there are any workarounds to work on both directions simultaneously with some trade offs, then we should target the AI feature as higher priority for the Q3/