Project Context

Meta's Instagram Reels team is preparing a 10-week launch of a new ranking improvement intended to increase short-term engagement without hurting creator satisfaction. You are the Engineering Manager for a team of 8 engineers, 1 data scientist, and 1 product manager. The project is high visibility because the VP wants the change included before the next quarterly business review, and several partner teams depend on your launch date.

Key Stakeholders

The Product Director wants a measurable lift in Reels session depth. The Integrity team is concerned the new ranking may amplify borderline content. The Infra team wants to avoid a meaningful increase in online inference cost. The Reels creator team cares most about creator distribution fairness and is pushing for additional diagnostics before launch.

Constraints

You have 10 weeks total, a fixed budget of $180,000 for experimentation support and labeling, and no additional headcount. The model depends on a feature pipeline owned by a separate ML platform team that can only commit 1 engineer for 25% of their time. The launch must begin with a 5% traffic ramp and cannot increase p95 ranking latency by more than 8 ms or inference cost by more than 4%.

Complications

1. Two weeks into execution, the Product Director asks whether the team can add a creator-personalization component that was not in the original scope.
2. Early offline results look promising, but Integrity identifies a potential 1.5% increase in sensitive-content impressions for teen accounts.
3. The data scientist and PM are using different definitions of launch success in their weekly updates.

Deliverables

1. Define how you would make success criteria explicit and shared across engineering, product, integrity, and infra.
2. Build a 10-week execution plan with milestones, owners, and decision points.
3. Explain how you would handle the mid-project scope request while keeping the team aligned.
4. Propose a launch-readiness framework, including go/no-go criteria, guardrails, and rollback triggers.
5. Describe the communication cadence and artifacts you would use to ensure everyone stays clear on what success looks like.