Planet RoadmapEvery product team faces the same tension: more work to do than people to do it. Resource allocation is the art of distributing your team's capacity across competing priorities without burning people out or leaving critical projects understaffed. Getting it right means saying no to good ideas so you can say yes to the best ones.
Start with Capacity, Not Demand
Most allocation mistakes start by listing everything that needs to get done and then trying to squeeze it into the available time. Flip the approach. Start with your actual capacity—accounting for meetings, on-call rotations, vacations, and maintenance work—and then decide how to spend what remains.
A common rule of thumb is that only 60 to 70 percent of a developer's time goes to planned feature work. The rest is consumed by code reviews, bug fixes, support escalations, and operational tasks. Plan for that reality instead of pretending it does not exist.
Allocation Models
There are several ways to divide capacity across projects. Choose the model that fits your team structure and project mix.
- Dedicated teams: assign people full-time to a single project for its duration
- Percentage-based: allocate 70% to Project A, 30% to Project B
- Rotation: team members cycle between projects on a weekly or sprint basis
- On-demand: pull people onto projects as needed, with a shared backlog
Avoiding Overcommitment
The biggest resource allocation failure is assigning someone to three projects at 40 percent each. Context switching between projects destroys productivity. If a person is split across more than two workstreams, they are effectively part-time on all of them. Minimize splits and protect focus time.
Making Allocation Visible
Allocation decisions should be visible to the whole team, not locked in a spreadsheet on a manager's laptop. When everyone can see where capacity is going, it is easier to have honest conversations about trade-offs. Planet Roadmap gives you a clear view of what each team member is working on across projects, making overallocation obvious before it becomes a problem.