A situational PM question. You’re in the PM’s seat, and there’s a call to make.
The situation: You’re the PM for an industrial IoT monitoring platform used by commercial greenhouse operators. Your engineering lead warns you that supporting the first-generation wireless soil sensors is consuming 35% of the platform team’s sprint capacity due to an outdated radio protocol.
What you know:
- Of your 820 total customer accounts, 95 still run exclusively on the Gen-1 sensors, representing $640,000 in annual recurring revenue.
- A full hardware upgrade kit costs $4,200 per facility, and the sales team reports these 95 accounts are operating on thin margins with no planned capital expenditure.
- The platform team has a six-month backlog of critical security updates and automated alerting improvements requested by the remaining 725 customers.
Your call: How do you handle the Gen-1 sensor support over the next two quarters?
There’s no single right answer. Reply with what you’d do and why, and I’ll follow up with a question or two.
