ShopWave, a mid-market e-commerce platform, is replacing its legacy web checkout service with a new microservice-based checkout flow to reduce payment failures and support faster feature releases. You are the program manager responsible for execution planning across engineering, QA, product, and operations. The team has 10 weeks to launch before the holiday sales freeze, and leadership has stated that a failed launch would directly impact Q4 revenue.
The delivery team includes 6 backend engineers, 2 frontend engineers, 1 QA lead, 1 SRE, and 1 product manager. The new checkout must support credit cards, PayPal, promo codes, tax calculation, and order confirmation emails at launch. Current checkout handles 1.2 million transactions per week, so quality and rollback readiness are critical.
The VP of Product wants the full feature set live before the holiday freeze. The Engineering Manager wants to reduce scope to protect reliability. The Head of Support wants fewer customer-facing defects and better incident playbooks. Finance requires payment reconciliation accuracy from day one.