You are the engineering manager leading a reliability and performance upgrade for a customer-facing outage reporting and status experience used during major weather events. The current experience has rising page latency, inconsistent outage status updates, and a growing backlog of production defects, but executive leadership wants improvements live before the start of storm season because customer complaints and contact center volume spike sharply during large outages. The work is tricky because the same engineers own both feature delivery and incident response, one critical dependency is a data feed from an internal grid operations team that has missed prior deadlines, and there is pressure to ship visible improvements quickly even though several quality issues are rooted in underlying platform work that customers will not directly see. You need to move fast enough to hit the seasonal deadline without creating regressions in a high-traffic, high-visibility surface.
| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Engineers | 6 total (3 backend, 2 frontend, 1 QA automation) |
| Product/design support | 1 PM, 1 designer shared at 50% |
| Deadline | 10 weeks before storm season readiness review |
| Current peak traffic | 8x normal traffic during severe outage events |
| Open defects | 14 Sev-2 / Sev-3 defects in outage experience |
| External dependency | 1 internal operations data feed team |
| Reliability target | 99.95% availability during peak events |
| Budget | No additional headcount approved |
How would you plan and execute this project so your team delivers high-quality improvements quickly, while making the right trade-offs on scope, sequencing, testing, and launch readiness?