Project Context
Databricks is preparing a large internal engineering initiative to migrate a major set of enterprise customers from legacy workspace-level governance to Unity Catalog. The initiative spans platform engineering, control plane services, customer experience, support tooling, and field enablement. You are the Engineering Manager responsible for defining success criteria before implementation begins so the team can align on scope, sequencing, and launch readiness.
The project team includes 11 engineers across backend, frontend, and infrastructure, plus 1 TPM and 1 product manager. Leadership wants an execution plan within 2 weeks because several strategic accounts are blocked on stronger cross-workspace governance and auditability. The target launch window is 16 weeks from kickoff.
Key Stakeholders
- VP of Engineering wants a credible plan with measurable launch gates
- Product Management wants broad feature coverage to improve adoption
- Customer Success wants minimal migration friction for top 50 accounts
- Support wants clear rollback paths and operational runbooks
- Security and compliance want no regression in access controls or audit logs
Constraints
- Fixed delivery window: 16 weeks
- Budget for external tooling and contractor support: $180,000
- No additional full-time headcount approved
- 3 dependent teams must deliver APIs by weeks 4, 6, and 8
- 2 engineers are on shared on-call rotation and only available 60% of time
Complications
- Sales has already told two strategic customers that migration will be "self-serve" at launch, but the current design may still require support-assisted steps.
- One dependent control plane team has missed its last two quarterly commitments.
- Security leadership will block launch if audit log completeness is not proven before GA.
Your Task
- Define the success criteria you would set before the team starts building.
- Explain how you would separate must-have launch criteria from post-launch goals.
- Propose a 16-week execution plan with milestones, dependencies, and decision points.
- Identify the main trade-offs you would make if a dependency slips by 2 weeks.
- Describe how you would align stakeholders on these criteria and handle conflicting expectations.
