Project Background
Databricks wants to ship a unified navigation and workflow experience across Lakeflow Jobs, Lakeflow Pipelines, and related workspace entry points to reduce context switching for data engineers and analysts. You are the UX/UI Designer leading execution with a cross-functional team of 10: 3 product designers, 4 engineers, 1 PM, 1 UX researcher, and 1 content designer. The VP of Product has asked for a customer-visible launch in 12 weeks so the update can be demoed at an upcoming field event.
Key Stakeholders
The PM for Lakeflow wants to maximize feature adoption and keep scope broad enough to show a meaningful platform story. The Engineering Manager wants to minimize front-end rework because the team is already committed to reliability fixes in Jobs. The Design Systems lead wants the experience to align with the Databricks design system and avoid one-off patterns. The Sales and Solutions Engineering teams want a polished demo path for strategic accounts, while Support is concerned that major navigation changes could increase ticket volume.
Constraints
- Timeline: 12 weeks to public preview
- Budget: $120K for research, prototyping, and contractor QA support
- Team capacity: no additional full-time headcount
- Dependency: Design system component updates will not be available until Week 5
- Research access: only 8 customer interviews and 2 usability rounds before launch
- Engineering constraint: only 2 front-end engineers can support the new navigation full-time
Complications
- A senior engineer is allocated 40% to a parallel Lakeflow reliability initiative.
- Early internal feedback shows disagreement between PM and Support: PM wants a broad navigation overhaul, while Support wants a low-change rollout to reduce user confusion.
- One strategic customer has been promised an early preview in Week 10.
Your Task
- Create a 12-week execution plan to align design, PM, engineering, research, and go-to-market teams.
- Define how you would drive interdisciplinary collaboration while preserving a unified UX vision.
- Recommend scope trade-offs for public preview versus follow-on releases.
- Identify launch risks, mitigation steps, and decision points for rollback or phased rollout.
- Define success criteria for the first 30 days after launch.
