Recall that Microspeak is not merely for jargon exclusive to Microsoft, but it’s jargon that you need to know to survive at Microsoft.

In business, funding usually refers to having enough money to pay for ongoing operations.

In Microsoft engineering groups, it doesn’t mean that.

In Microspeak, funding refers to having enough people available to work on a feature. A feature that has adequate people assigned to work on it is considered to be funded, or for emphasis, fully funded, whereas a feature that does not have people working on it is unfunded.

Of course, you can have intermediate states, like partially funded, to say that some people have been assigned to it, but not enough to finish the work in time for a specific requested completion date.

Here are some citations I found.

Funding for this feature is being worked through.

This is another way of saying, “We are working on finding people to work on this feature.” This might come at the cost of defunding whatever feature those people had previously been assigned to.

The path for getting out of red involves closing on funding gaps.

In other words, there is a color-coded dashboard on which a feature is currently listed as red. There are currently some shortfalls in staffing (funding gaps), and we will have to resolve (close on) those shortfalls in order to get out of red to a more favorable color.

X said that they do not have engineering resources to fund the Y updates.

In a larger discussion about updating components throughout the system to support the Y feature, person X said that they do not have any people available who can do the Y work for their component.

Note that a feature that is unfunded is not cut. The feature is still planned. It’s just that there is nobody available to do it right now. If funding cannot be obtained soon, the feature will have to be delayed to a later release.

Bonus chatter: Software engineers are not fungible. If you take a developer who works on the taskbar and reassign them to the window manager they won’t be as effective as someone who normally works on the window manager. Furthermore, reassigning a developer across teams involves the receiving team having an open req, and reqs are generally difficult to come by since they are subject to all sorts of business constraints.