Project Context
NovaPay, a B2B payments company, is preparing a major upgrade to its billing platform used by 4,200 mid-market customers. Over the last two quarters, the team has shipped quickly but introduced too many production defects: 6 Sev-1 incidents, 14 emergency rollbacks, and a drop in customer satisfaction from 41 to 34 NPS. You are the program manager asked to improve engineering quality and reliability without materially slowing the release cadence.
The project covers 3 engineering squads (18 engineers total), 2 QA engineers, 1 SRE, and 1 product manager. Leadership wants visible improvement within one quarter because two enterprise renewals worth $3.8M ARR are at risk if billing accuracy issues continue.
Key Stakeholders
Engineering leadership wants fewer incidents and more predictable delivery. Sales and Customer Success want faster feature releases for committed clients. The CFO cares most about invoice accuracy and reduced credits/refunds. Support wants better incident communication and fewer customer escalations.
Constraints
- Timeline: 12 weeks to show measurable improvement
- Budget: $120,000 for tools, training, and limited contractor support
- Team capacity: no new full-time headcount approved
- Existing commitment: 2 customer-promised billing features must still launch by Week 10
- Current baseline: deployment frequency is weekly, change failure rate is 18%, MTTR is 4.5 hours
Complications
- One senior staff engineer is leaving in Week 5, and they currently own the release pipeline.
- Sales has already promised a custom invoicing enhancement to a top customer by Week 8.
- QA automation covers only 38% of critical billing flows, and test environments are unstable.
Deliverables
- Create a 12-week execution plan to improve quality and reliability while preserving critical delivery commitments.
- Define the process, tooling, and ownership changes you would implement across engineering, QA, and SRE.
- Propose clear launch and release gates for the two committed features.
- Identify the top risks, trade-offs, and escalation points.
- Define how you will measure success by the end of the quarter.
