In this module9 lessons
Technical trade-offs
Name and decide the trade-offs PMs meet most, from latency and caching to queues and platforms, and prioritize technical debt with a clear method.
7 min readFull kit
Every technical choice gives something up
The "Call" step of the method is where a technical answer becomes a product answer. Engineers can tell you the options. Deciding which cost the product should pay usually needs someone who understands the users and the business. That is you.
A good trade-off statement has three parts: what you choose, what you give up, and why that is right for these users now. "I'd cache the product page for 60 seconds. We give up perfect freshness on the description, which nobody notices, and we get a much faster page during sales spikes."
One more test helps: how hard is this to reverse? Easy-to-reverse choices, such as a cache setting or a feature flag, should be made quickly and adjusted. Hard-to-reverse ones, such as a public API contract or a data model that millions of records depend on, deserve more care.
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