Project Background
You are the program lead for ShopSwift, a global e-commerce marketplace (~45M MAUs, 1.2M daily orders) with a fast-growing cross-border business. The company is launching “Instant Refunds”: when a customer cancels an order within 15 minutes (or a courier fails pickup), ShopSwift will issue an immediate refund to the original payment method. This is expected to reduce support contacts by 18% and improve repeat purchase rate by 0.6pp in key markets.
The catch: this program must be executed by a fully remote, globally distributed team spanning 8 time zones (Seattle, Austin, São Paulo, London, Berlin, Bangalore, Singapore, Sydney). The team has historically struggled with slow decision-making, duplicated work, and late discovery of integration issues due to limited overlap hours.
The CEO has committed publicly to a launch date aligned with a major brand campaign: 8 weeks from today. Missing the date means forfeiting $3.5M in prepaid marketing spend and delaying revenue impact into the next quarter. Meanwhile, the payments stack is shared with other initiatives and has strict reliability requirements (payments uptime target 99.95%). The program touches customer experience, payments processing, risk/fraud, finance reconciliation, and customer support tooling.
Stakeholder Landscape (and Competing Priorities)
- VP, Customer Experience (CX): Wants Instant Refunds live in all Tier-1 markets for the campaign. Prioritizes speed and customer sentiment; pushes for broad eligibility rules.
- Director, Payments Engineering: Owns the payments platform and is currently handling a separate PCI compliance remediation due in 6 weeks. Strongly resists risky changes near peak season.
- Head of Fraud & Risk: Concerned Instant Refunds will increase friendly fraud and refund abuse. Wants conservative eligibility and additional controls (device fingerprinting, velocity limits).
- Finance Controller: Needs accurate ledgering and reconciliation; worries about double-refunds and chargeback reporting. Requires audit-ready documentation.
- Regional GM (EU): Wants EU markets included at launch to compete with Zalando; flags PSD2/SCA edge cases and local payment method differences.
Your job is not only to create a plan, but to demonstrate how you would run execution with a remote team: alignment, communication cadence, decision-making, and risk management with limited real-time overlap.
Constraints
| Constraint | Details |
|---|
| Timeline | 8 weeks to public launch; no date slip allowed without SVP approval |
| Team | 16 total: 7 backend, 3 frontend, 2 data, 1 designer, 1 QA, 1 TPM (you), 1 support ops; all remote |
| Overlap | Only 2 hours/day overlap between US and India; 0 hours overlap between US West and Sydney |
| Dependencies | Payment processor certification window every 2 weeks; fraud rules require review by Risk Council (meets weekly) |
| Reliability | Must not degrade checkout; refunds pipeline must meet P95 < 2 minutes for eligible cases |
| Budget | $120K for contractors/tools; no additional headcount approved |
| Scope | Initial launch must cover US, UK, DE, FR, AU (5 markets) with localized comms and support macros |
Complications (Realistic Execution Issues)
- Key engineer availability: The Berlin-based backend lead is scheduled for 2 weeks PTO in weeks 5–6. They own the refunds ledger service.
- Time-zone decision latency: The fraud team (Austin) and payments team (Bangalore) disagree on eligibility rules; prior decisions have taken 10+ days due to async back-and-forth.
- Late-breaking compliance requirement: In week 3, Legal flags that for Germany, certain refund notifications must include specific language and retention requirements.
- Integration risk: The refunds system depends on an event stream that currently has occasional duplication; Instant Refunds could amplify double-refund risk.
Your Task (Deliverables)
Provide the following, as you would in a real execution interview:
- Remote execution operating model: Your proposed cadence (standups, weekly reviews, decision forums), documentation standards, and how you will run cross-time-zone handoffs.
- 8-week plan: A milestone-based plan with the critical path, explicit dependencies, and what you will de-scope if needed.
- Trade-off decisions: At least two concrete trade-offs you would make (e.g., market phasing, eligibility rules, fraud controls, UI scope) and how you’ll align stakeholders.
- Risk register + mitigations: Top risks (technical, schedule, compliance, operational) with triggers and contingency plans (including rollback).
- Launch readiness & success criteria: Define go/no-go gates, monitoring, on-call coverage across time zones, and what “successful launch” means in the first 72 hours and first 30 days.
You should assume you have authority to set process and drive alignment, but not to add headcount or change the public launch date without executive escalation.
