Project Background
Airtable is preparing a new engineering initiative to improve the reliability and usability of Automations for mid-market and enterprise customers. The proposed work includes faster run times for common triggers, clearer failure diagnostics, and a new admin-facing usage dashboard in Airtable Admin Panel. You are the Engineering Manager responsible for helping the team set goals, define success criteria, and align the launch plan before execution begins.
The initiative has a 16-week timeline and a dedicated team of 8 engineers, 1 product manager, 1 designer, and shared support from data engineering and SRE. Leadership wants the project included in the next half roadmap because Automations adoption is growing, but support tickets related to failed runs increased 18% last quarter.
Key Stakeholders
Key stakeholders include the Group Product Manager for Automations, the Head of Support, the SRE manager, Sales leaders focused on enterprise expansion, and the VP of Engineering. Their priorities conflict: Sales wants a visible customer-facing launch this half, Support wants fewer failure-related tickets, and SRE is concerned about reliability regressions during rollout.
Constraints
- Launch deadline: 16 weeks from kickoff
- Budget: no additional headcount; only $120,000 for vendor tools and contractor QA
- Team capacity: 2 of the 8 engineers must spend 25% of their time on production support
- Dependencies: Admin Panel dashboard instrumentation from the platform data team due by Week 6; security review required before any enterprise-facing release
- Rollout requirement: must support phased release to 10%, 50%, then 100% of eligible workspaces
Complications
- The data team says the instrumentation dependency may slip by up to 2 weeks.
- A large enterprise customer has escalated repeated automation failures and wants visible improvements before renewal in 12 weeks.
- Leadership has not aligned on whether the primary goal is adoption, reliability, or enterprise retention.
Your Task
- Define the initiative goals and success criteria you would propose.
- Build an execution plan that sequences delivery, dependencies, and rollout decisions.
- Explain the trade-offs you would make if scope must be reduced.
- Identify the top risks and how you would mitigate them.
- Describe how you would communicate progress and launch readiness to stakeholders.
