Project Context
ShopWave, a mid-market e-commerce platform, wants to launch a new customer referral program before the holiday season to accelerate user growth. You are the program manager leading the launch across Product, Engineering, Data, Marketing, and Finance. The working team includes 10 people: 1 PM, 4 engineers, 1 designer, 1 data analyst, 2 marketers, and 1 finance manager.
The CEO wants the program live in 8 weeks because paid acquisition costs have risen 22% quarter over quarter. However, leaders disagree on what “success” means: Marketing wants maximum invite volume, Finance wants CAC efficiency, Product wants retained new buyers, and Engineering wants a low-risk MVP with minimal fraud exposure.
Key Stakeholders
The VP of Marketing wants an aggressive incentive that can be promoted in paid and email channels. The Finance Director is concerned that generous rewards will erode contribution margin. The Head of Product wants success measured by first-to-second purchase conversion, not just signups. The Engineering Manager is worried about abuse, coupon stacking, and operational support load during launch.
Constraints
- Launch deadline: 8 weeks
- Budget: $180,000 total launch budget, including incentives and paid promotion
- Engineering capacity: 4 engineers, with 30% of one engineer's time reserved for checkout incidents
- Data dependency: referral tracking instrumentation is only 85% reliable today and needs fixes before launch
- Legal dependency: referral terms must be approved within 3 weeks
Complications
- A competitor launched a similar referral program last month with a $20/$20 incentive, increasing pressure to match it.
- Historical promotions show that 12% of coupon-driven signups were low-quality users with no repeat purchase.
- Finance will block launch if projected payback exceeds 6 months.
Your Task
- Define the right pre-launch success criteria for this initiative and explain how you would align stakeholders on them.
- Build an execution plan for the 8-week launch, including decision points and dependencies.
- Recommend the MVP scope and key trade-offs if the team cannot deliver every requested feature.
- Identify the top launch risks, including fraud and measurement risk, and propose mitigations.
- Specify how you would monitor results in the first 30 days and decide whether to scale, adjust, or pause the program.
