Engineering Resource Allocation Checklist

Paste the canonical PRD or design doc link (Notion, Confluence, GitHub) and the measurable exit criteria. If exit criteria are still 'we'll know it when we see it,' the workstream isn't ready to staff — push back to product before assigning anyone.

Create the parent epic and milestone tickets (alpha, beta, GA) with target dates. Link any external commitments — customer launch, conference demo, contractual SLA date — so downstream pacing can anchor against them.

Note any constraints that change staffing — SOC 2 access-review timing, HIPAA BAA requirements, GDPR data-residency, customer-tier uptime SLA. These determine whether you need an SRE on rotation or an AppSec reviewer in the loop.

Break the work into Frontend, Backend, Mobile, SRE/Platform, QA, and AppSec slices. Note specialist skills that are scarce in the org — Kubernetes operators, iOS, Postgres at scale, Terraform module ownership — these drive the staffing risk register later.

Pull current sprint commitments per engineer and subtract on-call rotation, planned PTO, and interview load. Default assumption that everyone gives 100% of their week to one project is wrong by 30-50% on any team that ships production software.

Compare required skills (step 6) against available capacity (step 7). If there's a gap that training can't close in the timeline, you'll need a contractor SOW or a backfill hire — flag it now, not in week 3.

Loop in the hiring manager, finance, and legal. Contractor onboarding (laptop, GitHub access, SSO provisioning, 1Password vault) takes 1-2 weeks even with a fast-track; full-time hires take 6-12 weeks. Adjust the timeline assumptions accordingly.

Update the CODEOWNERS file in the relevant repos so PR review routing matches the staffing plan. Otherwise reviews land on the previous owner who's now context-switching back from another project.

Pull the last 3-4 sprints of velocity per engineer from Linear or Jira. Allocations that exceed historical velocity by more than 20% will slip; either descope or add headcount. Don't average across the whole team — one senior backfilling for two juniors hides the problem.

Name the IC, tech leads, designer, PM, and on-call owners for the new service. Include who reviews what (security review, infra review, accessibility review) so PRs don't sit waiting for an unnamed approver.

Multiply allocated FTE-weeks by fully-loaded cost. Contractor and vendor SOW costs go in here separately so finance can track them against the contractor bucket, not the headcount bucket.

Tag new resources with the project cost center so the bill is attributable. Include staging/preview environments and any data-egress costs for backfills or migrations — these are the line items finance asks about post-launch.

Get the contingency line approved as part of the original budget, not as a mid-project ask. The buffer covers the inevitable security finding, the third-party API that doesn't behave like its docs, and the migration that needs a second pass.

Wire up cross-team dependencies as ticket links — frontend blocked on backend API, backend blocked on schema migration, schema migration blocked on AppSec review. The dependency graph is what makes the timeline realistic vs. wishful.

Set up the project's burndown view, cycle-time chart, and capacity dashboard. Pin them in the project Slack channel so the data is one click away during standup, not buried in a Jira filter.

Standing 30-minute meeting with the IC, tech leads, and PM. Walk the burndown, flag scope changes, reconfirm staffing for the next sprint. Cancel only if everything is green — never default to skipping.

Ninety-minute session with the team: 'imagine it's launch day and we missed by 6 weeks — why?' Capture every plausible failure mode. Most pre-mortems surface the key-person dependency and the unknown vendor integration that nobody scoped.

For each workstream with a single owner, name the secondary and the knowledge-transfer plan (pairing sessions, runbook drafts, recorded design walkthroughs). Vacation, illness, and surprise resignations are not edge cases on a 6-month project.

Each risk gets an owner, a likelihood, an impact, and a trigger condition for escalation. Review the register at the weekly timeline review — risks without a recent update are either resolved (close them) or being ignored (escalate them).

Channel naming convention (e.g., #proj-checkout-rewrite), pinned links to PRD, dashboards, on-call schedule, and the weekly meeting Zoom. Async standup bot (Geekbot, Linear) for distributed teams; live standup for colocated.

One dashboard per audience: engineering (cycle time, PRs open, CI health) and stakeholder (milestone progress, scope, risk RAG). Don't show the engineering dashboard to execs — they will misread cycle-time fluctuation as a problem.

Five-line format: progress this week, plan for next week, risks/RAG, decisions needed, asks. Send Friday afternoon so execs read it before Monday — Monday-morning sends get buried.

DORA-style metrics work for most product teams: deploy frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, MTTR. Avoid using lines-of-code or commit count as a metric — they reward churn.

Compare actual sprint velocity to the plan from step 12. A 1-sprint dip is noise; a 2-sprint trend means the staffing model needs an adjustment — either the scope estimate was wrong, an engineer is blocked, or context-switching from another project is eating capacity.

Direct signal beats dashboard signal — ask each engineer what's blocked, what they're underwater on, and what they'd hand off if they could. Aggregate themes go into the next staffing decision.

Move tickets between owners, descope where needed, and update CODEOWNERS to match. Communicate the change in the project Slack channel — silent reassignments produce duplicate work and stale PRs.