How do you prioritize requirements

In a TikTok platform Product Manager interview, explain how product requirements are generated and how you prioritize competing work for a platform product with many internal stakeholders and limited engineering capacity.

Constraints & Assumptions

• Requirements should not come only from the loudest stakeholder.
• Platform users may include internal operations, creators, advertisers, analysts, or other product teams.
• Prioritization should balance business impact, user pain, technical constraints, reliability, compliance, and long-term leverage.
• Communicate tradeoffs clearly when requests are deferred.

Clarifying Questions to Ask

• Who are the platform users and stakeholders?
• What company OKR or product goal is the roadmap supporting?
• What constraints exist around engineering capacity, reliability, compliance, or migration work?
• Are requests mostly new features, operational tooling, risk work, or infrastructure improvements?

Part 1 - Identify Where Requirements Come From

Where do product requirements come from?

What This Part Should Cover

• Company strategy and OKRs, user research, product data, stakeholder requests, operational pain, technical debt, reliability, compliance, and risk.
• Validation of whether a request reflects a repeatable platform need or a one-off ask.

Part 2 - Evaluate Incoming Requests

How do you evaluate requests from different stakeholders?

What This Part Should Cover

• Clarifying the requester, user problem, frequency, current workaround, metric affected, urgency, and risk.
• Translating feature requests into comparable problem statements.
• Evidence gathering before committing roadmap capacity.

Part 3 - Prioritize With Limited Resources

How do you prioritize features or platform improvements?

What This Part Should Cover

• RICE or weighted scoring adapted for platform work.
• Platform-specific factors such as reusability, reliability, compliance risk, scalability, and architectural leverage.
• Clear categories such as must-do now, MVP later, not now, or manual workaround.

Part 4 - Explain Tradeoffs And Measure Success

How do you explain priorities and measure whether the chosen work succeeded?

What This Part Should Cover

• Communication of business goal, impacted users, expected metric movement, engineering cost, and deferred work.
• Stakeholder management when senior or loud requests are deprioritized.
• Metrics such as adoption, task completion time, error rate, SLA, throughput, satisfaction, support tickets, and reliability.