Ground Ovation Decisions in Value

Company Context

Emerson is a global industrial technology company serving process, hybrid, and discrete manufacturers through software, automation, and instrumentation. Assume you are an Engineering Manager supporting Emerson Ovation, used by power and water utilities to monitor operations, manage alarms, and improve plant reliability.

Problem

The Ovation engineering team has a growing backlog of requests from utility operators, plant managers, services teams, and sales. Recent releases shipped several technically elegant improvements, but customer adoption has been uneven: only 22% of target accounts actively use two of the last five major workflow enhancements, while support tickets related to alarm overload and slow operator diagnosis remain high. At the same time, leadership is pushing for faster roadmap delivery and clearer linkage between engineering investment, renewals, and expansion.

You have been asked: How do you keep engineering decisions grounded in customer and business value? Your answer should focus on how you would make product decisions for Ovation rather than on people management in the abstract.

Deliverables

1. Define the customer and business problems you would clarify before making roadmap or architecture decisions.
2. Identify the most important user segments and their core jobs-to-be-done within Ovation.
3. Propose a decision-making approach for prioritizing engineering work across customer pain points, technical debt, platform investments, and new features.
4. Explain what evidence you would use to validate that decisions are creating value for both customers and Emerson.
5. Describe the key trade-offs you would make if engineering capacity is limited for the next 2 quarters.

Constraints

• You have capacity for only one major initiative and two smaller improvements over the next 6 months.
• Many customers are regulated utilities, so reliability and change management matter more than consumer-style release velocity.
• Usage telemetry is incomplete across on-prem deployments.
• Sales is requesting differentiating features for competitive deals, while support is pushing for usability and reliability fixes.
• You cannot assume a full platform rewrite or a large new headcount request.