Wait, what? Asking for additional resources while there is a (threat of) recession? That doesn’t make any sense! Or does it?

It seems like every tech company is cutting costs these days. Your company might be no different. So when, for example, the product manager in your team left, they saw it as an opportunity and didn’t let you hire someone else. All nice-to-haves are gone. Parties, office yoga, I’ve even heard about companies that cut the food and kitchen supplies. Of course all salary raises are on hold, as well as any optional bonuses. Some companies went through minor or major layoffs. Anything you need to survive.

These are tough times. Asking for anything seems inappropriate. Some requests truly are. But many requests could be appropriate or inappropriate depending on the context. For example, a budget for a team event. Now is not the time right? But what if the team worked really hard on an important release, they feel burnout, and their productivity is at risk? Or what if the team has trouble working well together, and this kind of event might help them learn to collaborate and would pay off in their results? I deliberately chose something that seems to belong deep in the nice-to-have bucket, to show that even that might have a specific justification.

Because here is the deal: companies still spend money these days. Even when there is a hiring freeze, often a few job openings are left open. Tightening budgets mean that companies look much closer at what they spend money on, and want to see the value of each dollar they spend, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t spend altogether.

So how can you make your request stand out and get what you really need? It starts with replacing the “you” in the sentence with “the company”. Most requests are not personal to you, even if they would have a dramatic impact on your professional life directly. When you think about it as something that would benefit the company (and can explain exactly how), it’s much easier to justify any such investment.

My marketing manager recently asked me to define our yearly marketing budget so that she can plan accordingly. I found myself struggling. What budget should I allocate? I can spend a little or a lot – which one is right? 

Seeing it from the decision maker’s side reminded me again how important it is to make your requests in a way that helps your manager to help you and to say yes. When it comes to asking for additional resources – like hiring someone for your team, or allocating more engineers to your product – there are things you can do to increase your chances of getting a “yes”. Here are the three most important things to pay attention to.

Tie It to Results, Not Resources

With my marketing budget, it was hard for me to decide since I couldn’t tie the investment I would be making to clear and coherent results. This should also be your guideline when you are asking for anything – it all starts with being super clear on what you are trying to achieve with it.

The problem is that most of the time when you get to ask for more resources, it’s not because you have specific results in mind, it’s because you see that what you have now isn’t working. 

This is how it usually happens: you see that the team is busy. Everyone is working so hard, and yet the work never ends. Everything is so important and you find yourself making impossible decisions about prioritizations between things that are all super important and none of them is nice to have. At some point, you realize that the team cannot continue this way, and the conclusion is that you need more people.

One could expect that when you explain it this way to your manager they would understand and give you what you are asking for, right? It’s not like you are asking for this for your own benefit so that you can go to the beach while everyone else is working. It’s for the company and the product, and for the great people that you already hired and you want to help them succeed or worry that at some point they will leave because of the impossible load.

Well, unfortunately, that’s not how it works, as I found out having made these requests time and again over the years. As a manager with a limited budget, any allocation they make to your area comes at the expense of something else they could be doing with it. And so, while they sympathize with the problem you raised, this is usually not enough to convince them that it’s an investment worth making. 

Moreover, when you define the problem as the team’s load, your manager would automatically think of other solutions – all in the areas of productivity, well-defined R&Rs, processes, etc. You know you have tried it all, but it will be very difficult for you to convince them that you did. One can always find ways to improve some more in these areas.

To make an effective request, you need to separate what triggered the request from the request itself. The trigger will still most likely be similar to what I described above. But once you identified that you need more people, start asking yourself what would you be able to do with these people that you can’t do today. And it needs to be something significant, not just more of the same as what you are already doing.

But is there such a thing?

Some Balls Have to Drop

As product leaders, we are heavily invested in our product’s success. We do whatever we can to drop no balls, and do wonders with whatever resources we have. It is hard enough to say no to others, but when we think something is important, it is almost impossible to let it go. And so, we are trying hard to include everything we believe in, and guess what? It works! 

So when you want to go to the CEO to ask for more people, and following my advice above you want to talk about results, in many cases, you are left with nothing significant to talk about, since you are already taking care of the results they care about.

You know that you are doing this at the expense of your team’s well-being and that this is not durable, but this brings us back to the productivity argument. You’ll get a budget for a team event to let everyone have fun and come back with fresh energy, but you won’t get what you really need – more people.

So instead of spreading your team so thin that they can do just the bare minimum on all fronts, try to focus on some of the fronts, and ask for more people to focus on the others. To be clear, I’m not talking about manipulation and making a false pretense that you are too busy to take upon yourself another project. If you can truly take it – that’s great, and I’m sure you’ll do your best to succeed. 

But if you can only succeed with a heavy price to pay – it can be a personal price or results which are not good enough or too large of a negative impact on other areas of the product – and you take it upon yourself anyway, don’t be surprised that no one sees the price and they only see that it works. And if it works, why change anything?

Even if you already started, it’s not too late to say that you realized that what you have right now cannot lead to success. Be willing to say what you and the team cannot do, but in the broader definition of it: if the price you pay is too high, then even if you can theoretically do it, in practice that means you can’t.

Make a Specific Request

The last piece of advice here is simple: your request needs to be specific. It’s easier when you know the results you want to achieve and you have sorted out what you can and cannot do with the resources you have today.

Understand exactly what it takes to be able to achieve this result: how many people you need, for how long, what functions, and also what profiles – junior? Senior? Specific domain expertise?

By making your request as specific as possible you are not only making it easier for your manager to understand what you need, you are also helping them understand why you need this. For example, if up until now the PM who managed the mobile app also managed the payments, and you realize this is a much more complex domain than you thought, saying that you need a PM with a payments background helps your manager understand that you want to double down on this area, even if you didn’t say it explicitly.

As always, the process of defining your specific request will take you back to the results that you wanted to achieve and will help you clarify that part as well. So in the example above, the fact that you want to double down on payments would actually make it to the opening line of your request, and your manager wouldn’t really need to figure it out themselves.

Remember that it all needs to work together: after your manager is excited about the results you want to achieve with these additional resources, they need to understand how these exact resources will help you get there. They will most likely also ask for a rough plan, to increase their confidence that this will actually work.

Whenever you are asking for resources, you are basically asking for someone to invest in you or your project. They have many other investment options, but you want them to choose yours. For that to happen, they need to believe in the cause, but also to believe that you can do it. Convince them on both, and you’ll find it much easier to get whatever you wanted.

Effective communication that leads to getting what you want is one of the topics that the participants of the CPO Bootcamp are working on during the program. Starting from the first day of the program, the participants practice setting clearly defined goals for themselves and for their teams on a regular cadence, so that they not only know what they need to achieve, but also what is missing and which requests they need to make, especially when we all need to do more with less.