Project Context
Braze is preparing a Q3 release for Canvas, focused on improving journey orchestration for enterprise customers. You are the Engineering Manager for a team of 8 engineers responsible for delivering a new Canvas audience re-entry control feature that Product believes will improve adoption among large customers running complex lifecycle campaigns. The feature has executive visibility because it is tied to the company goal of increasing enterprise expansion revenue this half.
Key Stakeholders
The Group Product Manager wants the full feature set shipped before the quarterly customer advisory board. The Sales Engineering lead is pushing for two customer-specific workflow requests needed to unblock renewals. The Staff Engineer is concerned that the current implementation plan adds operational risk to the existing Canvas execution path. The Data Science partner wants instrumentation added so the team can measure adoption and downstream impact in Braze dashboards.
Constraints
- Timeline: 10 weeks until the planned release candidate
- Team: 8 engineers, including 2 new hires who are not yet fully ramped
- Budget: No additional headcount and only $40,000 available for contractor QA support
- Dependency: Platform Engineering must deliver a rate-limiting service update by Week 4
- Reliability constraint: Canvas message send latency cannot regress by more than 3% at p95
- Existing load: 2 engineers must spend 25% of their time supporting a parallel incident-reduction initiative
Complications
- A top enterprise customer has asked for an exception flow that is not in the committed scope, and Sales has implied it is critical for renewal.
- Early technical design review shows the feature may require changes to both Canvas backend orchestration and reporting pipelines, increasing risk late in the cycle.
- Leadership wants clear evidence that the team’s roadmap is aligned to company goals, not just customer requests.
Deliverables
- Create a 10-week execution plan that shows how you align the team’s work to company goals.
- Define the scope trade-offs you would make between core roadmap work, customer asks, and technical risk reduction.
- Propose how you would communicate priorities and progress to Product, Sales, Platform Engineering, and leadership.
- Define success criteria, launch readiness checks, and a rollback approach.
- Identify the top risks to delivery and how you would mitigate them.
