hardScenarioCase StudyMidSeniorStaffLead
The platform migration has no user-visible benefit. How do you rank it against features customers are asking for?
5 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
Convert the migration into the units the roadmap already uses by pricing its carrying cost and the cost of delaying it, then rank it on the same scale as features rather than arguing for it as a special category that deserves exemption.
Prioritisation matters here because the ranking invisible platform work against customer answer has to show the boundary, not just the happy path.
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Likely follow-ups
- Engineering says the migration is eighteen months and cannot be split. How do you respond?
- How would you tell a genuine platform constraint from an engineer's preference for cleaner code?
- What proportion of capacity would you standingly reserve for this class of work, and why that number?
- The migration slips and the feature you cut is now late for nothing. What do you say to the team?
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