Why won't they give us the resources?
One of the hardest problems in a technical company is deciding how and when to invest in new product efforts. Engineers and time are expensive, so investing too much, too soon, is a good way to run out of money. But taking too long to invest in meaningful things can make the company less effective, or even uncompetitive in the market.
One of the common patterns here is that product teams will have high conviction about a new product area, but the finance teams won’t want to invest in it, to the consternation and confusion of the product team. “This is clearly a good idea! We have customers who want it! Why aren’t we doing it? Give me the 100 people I need” etc.
The perspective of the financial folks isn’t too complicated but it’s worth looking at to understand - most engineers don’t actually think through this explicitly.
Fundamentally, the job of the finance team is to keep the company healthy financially. This has many components - overall cash flow, profits in various contexts (before or after taxes, etc). So the immediate question the financial people usually have is “will we run out of cash?”. If the idea is great, but it takes so many people and so much time that the company goes out of business, it’s not worth doing.
The other way to think about the health of the company is margin. After all the expenses are accounted for, the company has some kind of operating margin - the difference between revenue and expenses. Ideally, you want this to stay at the same percentage, or go up. It can go down, but that makes everything harder - if you cut your margin in half, you need twice as much revenue to make the same profit, and since profit is ultimately all that matters, that makes the company less valuable until you get back to that point (and it makes every future dollar of revenue less valuable - margin is important!).
So usually we look at whether something is “dilutive” to margin (the margin for this effort is less than the overall margin of the company, so the average goes down), or “accretive” (the reverse). So a good way to try to convince your finance folks that it’s worth investing in a new project is to make the case that it’s “accretive to margin”.
But even here, teams are often frustrated, because there’s one more factor they don’t usually consider: expected success rate. Not all projects work out, no matter how hard we try. If you success rate is, say, 1 time in 3, then saying you have a new project idea with 30% margin is really telling the CFO that their expected margin is 10% - and if that’s not accretive, it’s not a good idea.
So, there are two obvious ways to address this problem - the “simpler” one is to only look at things where the margin is so high that it overcomes the expected value problem. This works, but it limits what the company does, and will prevent you from finding interesting problems that don’t immediately present as high-margin (there are plenty of these, too). The more complex but better one is to try to work on the expected value part by reducing the risk of failure. That doesn’t mean reducing failure overall - good if you can do it, but that approach often leads to other problems with being too risk adverse. It can mean developing repeatable processes, good measurement tools, incremental development patterns so new ideas can be proofed out in stages that lower risk - all of the usual suspects.
So if you have an amazing idea, and you don’t know why your CEO or CFO won’t give you the funding for it - take a minute to think through it from their perspective, and see what you can do to help manage the financial risk and align it with what the company needs - it’s not simple, but it’s better than complaining!