Prioritize the roadmap for notification system with limited engineering capacity

Problem Statement Description

You are the product manager for a notification system used by developers to configure, send, monitor, and troubleshoot notifications across a large-scale technology product. The system may support multiple channels such as email, push, SMS, in-app, webhooks, or developer-facing alerts, and it must balance timely delivery with user trust, relevance, reliability, and operational cost.

Engineering capacity is limited, and several roadmap requests are competing for attention: improving delivery reliability, adding new notification channels, building better targeting and personalization controls, reducing spam or duplicate messages, improving developer tooling and observability, supporting compliance and preference management, and scaling infrastructure for future growth. Your task is to define how you would prioritize the roadmap and execute against the highest-value work.

The interview is focused on execution judgment: how you clarify goals, translate ambiguous needs into an operating plan, sequence work, align stakeholders, and manage launch risk when the team cannot build everything at once.

The experience should consider:

- The primary users and workflows, especially developers who create, test, debug, and manage notifications.

- The business and product outcome of driving useful engagement without creating notification fatigue or trust issues.

- How to compare roadmap items using impact, urgency, effort, dependencies, risk, and reversibility.

- Owners, cross-functional dependencies, and sequencing across product, engineering, design, data, infra, legal, and support.

- Go/no-go criteria for shipping improvements, including quality, reliability, deliverability, and user-facing risk.

- Rollback or mitigation plans if notifications fail, are delayed, duplicated, or sent to the wrong audience.

- Communication plans for internal teams and external developers when behavior, APIs, dashboards, or limits change.

- How success will be monitored after launch and how learnings will feed back into the roadmap.

The goal is to present a practical prioritization and execution plan for a notification system roadmap under constrained engineering capacity, showing how you would make trade-offs, protect user trust, and deliver measurable engagement value.