Datadog is preparing to launch a new internal reliability dashboard used by engineering managers and SRE leads to track service health, incident trends, and release risk across 40 backend services. The project is already approved, but the prior tech lead left the company and the remaining team needs clear execution leadership to deliver within the quarter. You are stepping in to lead 8 engineers and 3 technical specialists across backend, frontend, data platform, QA, and security.
The VP of Engineering wants the dashboard live before QBR in 10 weeks to support planning decisions. The Security lead requires audit logging and role-based access controls before launch. The SRE director wants broad service coverage on day one, while the Engineering Director prefers a narrower MVP to reduce delivery risk. These priorities are not fully aligned.
The remaining budget is $180,000, including vendor costs and contractor QA support. The team cannot add full-time headcount. Two senior backend engineers are each allocated only 50% because they also support production incidents. A dependency on the data platform team must be completed by Week 4 to expose incident-history APIs. The launch date is fixed for Week 10, and only one rollback window is available during that week.