Lessons Building Products with Limited Resources

I’ve always felt like a bit of an underdog as a product manager.

Based in the Bay Area, I’m surrounded by folks working at tech giants like Google, Amazon, Meta, and the like. For a long time, I thought that to truly experience product management, I needed to join one of these companies.

But then I took a step back.

These big companies have massive budgets, countless customers, and likely a whole set of challenges I can’t even imagine. But my journey as a PM has been different.

I’ve built and launched products in environments with extremely limited resources. My first startup survived for nearly three years without any external funding. Subsequent roles involved fighting for every engineer and tool, even basic analytics platforms like Pendo required a solid business case.

Working with limited resources is tough, but it’s also incredibly rewarding. I’ve learned that success hinges on a few key factors:

Extreme clarity on vision and direction

A clear vision, strategy, and roadmap are your compass in a resource-constrained environment. You can’t afford to be vague or ambiguous.

When there is lack of clarity, every stakeholder group will focus on what is important to them and the needle does not move in one direction. For example, business may want to reduce churn but engineering might be working on a new product. These are disjointed due to lack of clarity.

As a product manager, it is your job to ensure that there is clarity on what the product is trying to accomplish and how it is aligned to the business objectives. Once you have clarity on vision and purpose, magic happens and every stakeholder is energized towards that vision.

And just having a vision is not enough. You need to communicate and get buy in from everyone on that vision and strategy.

Talk to your stakeholders in engineering, marketing, sales operations. Ask them what the company strategy is and how the product strategy is evolving. They may not be able to give a high fidelity response but they should be talking about it in the same direction. If what they say is different from each other, then that is a sign of lack of clarity. Your work is then cut out.

What if there is no business goal or company strategy. That is a sign a bigger problem, and you need to get that clarified from your management. Otherwise whatever you build in the product is something random.

You may argue that is a problem for large companies with big budgets also. True. However they have existing product sales that could give them a cushion for a while. In a resource constrained environment, this could be a death knell.

Ruthless Prioritization is Essential

On the lines of the above point on clarity, prioritization is also critical. Choosing the right product features and capabilities to work on is essential. It’s also important to know what you are not working on and have that agreed upon across your company.

When you are in a resource constrained environment, your job is to work on things that gives the maximum outcome. Almost always, there are 5 things that are super high priority. You can only do two, for example. Which one do you choose.

This is tough call to make. You need to know the expected outcome of each initiative with a high degree of confidence. And then choose the one that gives you maximum leverage at the highest probability. Test these initiatives against the overall product strategy and company goals.

Let’s say the company goals are increase net new logos and reduce churn by 5% points. Now look at the initiatives you have planned and determine which of your initiatives will help you get to these two business goals.

Even after this level of prioritization, you may have a bit too much to do. Now you cannot ask for more resources. You have to make tradeoffs. Sometimes you will need to make a judgement call.

Extreme prioritization for business outcomes is a crucial skill.

Perfect Stakeholder Alignment

Alignment with stakeholders is of utmost important. There is no room for misalignment. Everyone needs to be firing in the same direction, like a laser beam.

Sometimes we in product management have a very good idea about our vision, roadmap and plans. But our stakeholders don’t have that level of understanding. It takes time for them to also internalize your product.

Ensure everyone — from engineering to sales to customer success — understands the product vision and roadmap. Use regular sync-ups and clear communication channels to keep everyone on the same page. For instance, if sales is pushing for a feature that doesn’t align with your product strategy, have a candid conversation about the trade-offs and potential impact.

If the company goal is to improve Net Retention Rate by 10 points, then you need to arm the customer success and account teams with new capabilities and help them deliver that. Otherwise they will prioritize pushing the new product.

It’s Your Job

In big companies there are many departments. You will have someone take care of your graphics, someone else to take care of web site messaging, sameto create tha fancy deck and so on. They might also have an army of program and project managers to help you get through the tasks.

In a resource constrained company, there are no big departments. Working and collaborating across all stakeholders becomes a PM responsibility. There’s no time for passing the buck. Product managers must take ownership of the entire product lifecycle. This means collaborating closely with engineering, design, marketing, and sales, and being hands-on in problem-solving.

It’s not our job to do everything, but it’s our job to make sure things get done.

Conclusion

Some may argue that these challenges are also applicable to big companies with big budgets. More so because they have to prove the ROI on these investments.

Perhaps.

But I have heard of countless examples of big companies working on products and projects that take years to finish or ultimately scrapped. They may well afford it. They have existing revenues and customers so there is some built in cushion. I am sure they can avoid that waste too (separate topic).

Resource constrained environments do not have this luxury.

The biggest cost in such environments is opportunity cost.

Every dollar, every hour, every resource is an investment with potential returns. When making decisions, consider the alternative uses of those resources. For instance, instead of building a new feature, could you allocate those resources to improving customer support, which might lead to increased retention and revenue?

Remember, building a successful product with limited resources is less about doing everything and more about doing the right things exceptionally well.

You have to work on those things that have the maximum expected outcome to achieve your business goals.