Project Context

You’re the program manager for ShopHub, a large e-commerce marketplace (~38M monthly active buyers, 1.6M sellers) operating in North America and Europe. ShopHub’s EU business is under pressure: conversion on the EU checkout funnel is 2.4% lower than the US, and the CFO has set a goal to recover €18M in annualized gross profit by improving payment success rates and reducing fraud losses.

A cross-functional team has proposed a set of changes to the EU checkout and payments stack: adding local payment methods (iDEAL, Bancontact), rolling out 3DS2 exemptions optimization, and introducing a new risk step-up flow for high-risk transactions. The work touches payments orchestration, fraud/risk models, mobile/web checkout UX, customer support tooling, and legal/compliance. The VP of EU Growth wants this shipped before the Q3 promotional season (10 weeks away), but Engineering is already committed to a parallel PCI scope reduction initiative and is worried about reliability and on-call load.

You are asked to run a 3-hour roadmap and trade-offs workshop to align on what will ship in the next 10 weeks vs. what gets deferred. The workshop must produce a decision the SVP will accept, and it must do so in a way that avoids the recurring issue: the loudest voices (Sales and Fraud) dominate, while Mobile, Support, and Compliance feedback arrives late and causes rework.

Stakeholder Landscape (Competing Priorities)

• EU Growth (Sales/Marketing) is pushing for iDEAL + Bancontact in 6 weeks to support two marquee campaigns and 5 enterprise merchants threatening churn.
• Fraud/Risk wants the new step-up flow first, citing a recent spike: fraud losses increased from 12 bps to 19 bps of GMV in the last 30 days.
• Payments Engineering insists the top priority is stabilizing the orchestration layer after two P1 incidents last month; they want to limit scope and avoid “launching into instability.”
• Legal/Compliance is concerned about PSD2/3DS2 handling, consent language, and data retention. They prefer fewer changes but with airtight documentation.
• Customer Support Ops is worried about contact rate increases; they want tooling and macros updated before any user-facing change.

Several stakeholders have a history of escalating after meetings, claiming they “weren’t consulted,” even when they attended.

Constraints

Workshop Setup

You will have 18 attendees:

• 2 PMs (Checkout PM, Payments PM)
• 1 Design lead + 1 Content strategist
• 6 Engineers (Payments, Mobile, Web)
• 2 Fraud/Risk leads
• 2 Data/Analytics partners
• 2 Legal/Compliance partners
• 2 Support Ops leads

Known dynamics:

• The EU Growth lead tends to dominate and pushes for commitments on the spot.
• The Compliance counsel is quiet in large groups but later blocks launches if concerns weren’t surfaced.
• The Mobile EM is remote and often gets interrupted.

Your Task (Deliverables)

Provide a detailed plan for how you will run this workshop to ensure all voices are heard and the group leaves with clear decisions. Specifically, produce:

1. A workshop agenda (minute-by-minute) for the 3-hour session, including facilitation techniques that prevent domination and encourage quieter stakeholders.
2. A pre-work plan (what you’ll send, to whom, and by when) to surface concerns early and avoid surprises.
3. A decision-making mechanism you’ll use in-session (e.g., DACI/RAPID, voting, decision matrix) and how you’ll handle disagreements without derailing.
4. A documented output format (what artifacts you’ll publish within 24 hours) that makes it hard for stakeholders to claim they weren’t heard.
5. A plan for post-workshop follow-through: how you’ll convert outcomes into an executable 10-week plan, including how you’ll manage late-breaking feedback.

Complications (Assume These Happen)

1. 48 hours before the workshop, Fraud shares a new analysis showing an additional €1.2M/month fraud exposure if step-up isn’t addressed immediately, and they request 30 minutes on the agenda.
2. During the workshop, the PSP partner emails that iDEAL certification may slip by 2 weeks unless ShopHub provides a dedicated integration engineer (which you don’t have).
3. In the last 20 minutes, the EU Growth lead asks for a public commitment to merchants by end of day, but Engineering says they can’t commit without a load test.

Explain how your facilitation approach ensures quieter stakeholders (Compliance, Support, Mobile) are heard in the moment and how you still drive to a decision under time pressure.