Project Background
NovaRetail, a mid-market e-commerce platform, wants to launch a new merchant analytics dashboard that gives sellers daily sales trends, inventory alerts, and campaign performance in one place. The feature is expected to improve merchant retention before the company’s annual customer conference in 10 weeks, where the CEO plans to announce it publicly.
The project team includes 6 engineers, 1 product manager, 1 designer, 1 data analyst, and you as the program manager. Engineering wants to reduce scope to protect platform stability, Product wants a polished MVP with three core workflows, and business leaders want at least one conference-ready customer success story at launch.
Key Stakeholders
The VP of Product cares about shipping a usable dashboard on time. The Engineering Manager is concerned about a fragile reporting pipeline that already causes weekly incidents. The Head of Sales wants two strategic merchants onboarded before the conference. The CFO has approved only limited contractor spend and expects measurable adoption within 30 days.
Constraints
- Timeline: 10 weeks total, with a hard launch date on September 15
- Budget: $120,000 remaining, including QA and any external analytics support
- Team capacity: 6 engineers, but 2 are allocated 40% to ongoing production support
- Dependencies: data pipeline upgrade must finish by Week 4 before dashboard QA can begin
- Launch requirement: pilot with 5 merchants by Week 8
Complications
- A senior frontend engineer is scheduled for planned leave during Weeks 6-7.
- Sales has already told one enterprise merchant they will get custom export functionality at launch, but that work is not in the approved scope.
- Early testing shows inventory alerts are generating false positives for about 12% of merchants.
Your Task
- Build a 10-week execution plan that aligns engineering, product, and business leaders around one launch goal.
- Define what should be in MVP versus deferred, and explain the trade-offs.
- Create a stakeholder communication and decision-making plan.
- Identify the top risks and mitigation steps.
- Define launch success metrics for the first 30 days.
