The 70/20/10 Investment Split
Allocate product building time 70% core, 20% strategic, 10% bets to balance stability and innovation
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 90%
Eeke de Milliano treats much of product management as managing funnels and portfolios. The portfolio rule: 70% of building time goes to the core product with product-market fit (including its maintenance and tech debt), 20% to strategic initiatives that aren't core but your strategy demands, and 10% to speculative bets. It keeps a team from either starving its core or never taking a big swing.
Origin
A widely-used allocation heuristic (popularized as Google's 70/20/10 innovation rule); Eeke de Milliano and host Lenny Rachitsky both note they independently arrived at the same ratios, though they bucket maintenance differently.
Core principles
- 01Product management reduces in large part to managing funnels and portfolios
- 02The core product should never consume more than 70% of resources
- 03Strategic-but-non-core work deserves a protected, named slice so it doesn't get squeezed out
- 04A standing 10% for bets keeps innovation funded by default rather than by exception
How to run it
- 1
Put 70% into the core product
Direct up to 70% of building time to the product that already has product-market fit — including new core features, maintenance, tech debt, and bug work.
Pro tip Bundle maintenance and tech debt inside the 70% so 'keeping the lights on' doesn't quietly eat your strategic and bet budgets.
Watch out No more than 70% of resources should go here, or you'll have nothing left for the future.
- 2
Reserve 20% for strategic initiatives
Allocate 20% to work that isn't your core product but that your strategy says you must do — adjacent capabilities the company needs to win.
- 3
Protect 10% for bets
Keep 10% for speculative, big-ambition bets that may not pan out but carry the outsized upside.
In the wild
Eeke de Milliano files core-product tech debt and maintenance squarely inside the 70%. Lenny Rachitsky uses the same 70/20/10 ratios but puts bugs and maintenance in the 20% and reserves the 10% purely for big ambitious bets.
→ Same allocation math, different bucketing — showing the ratios are the durable part and the bucket definitions adapt to the team.
Common mistakes
Letting the core consume everything
Without a hard cap around 70%, core work and maintenance expand to fill all capacity and no resources remain for strategic or speculative work.
Leaving maintenance unbudgeted
If bug and tech-debt work isn't explicitly assigned to a bucket, it silently cannibalizes whichever slice is least defended, usually the bets.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product leaders allocating a team's or org's roadmap capacity across a planning cycle
Not ideal for
Pre-PMF startups where nearly all effort should go to finding the core, making the split premature
From the transcript
“a lot of product management can sometimes be reduced to funnels and portfolios”
“70 of your building time should really be going to your core product that has product Market fit”
“20 of your time should be going to strategic initiatives that aren't core but like they're strategic to the company that you know you have…”
“10 of your time should be going towards bets”
“to me that falls like squarely in the 70 um so yeah like core product Tech debt sort of the the stuff that you kind…”
From the episode
How to foster innovation and big thinking
Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe)