Project Context
Meta plans a Q3 launch for a new Instagram Teen Safety package focused on reducing unwanted contact and improving parent trust. You are the PM leading a 16-person cross-functional team across Instagram product, integrity engineering, design, legal, and comms. Leadership wants visible impact before the start of the school year, when teen usage and public scrutiny both increase.
The roadmap currently includes three major workstreams: (1) stricter DM protections for teens, (2) expanded parental supervision tools, and (3) in-app education prompts about suspicious accounts. Engineering estimates show the team cannot fully ship all three at high quality by the target date.
Key Stakeholders
- VP, Instagram Product wants a meaningful Q3 launch with strong external messaging.
- Director of Integrity prioritizes measurable safety impact and low false positives.
- Legal/Policy requires review for teen privacy, parental controls, and regional compliance.
- Comms wants a simple story for press and creators.
- Engineering Manager is concerned about team capacity and launch risk.
Constraints
- Launch deadline: 10 weeks
- Team: 8 engineers, 2 designers, 1 data scientist, 1 UXR, 1 PM, 1 TPM, 2 legal/policy partners
- Budget for vendor research and localization: $180K
- Must support US, UK, and EU at launch
- Legal review requires 2 weeks after final scope lock
- Only 1 server-side experimentation slot is available for this team during the launch window
Complications
- A recent policy escalation has increased executive pressure to launch parental controls, even though the feature is behind schedule.
- Early testing shows the stricter DM protection model reduces risky contact, but also increases false positives for legitimate teen-to-teen conversations.
- The Instagram Notifications team, which owns one dependency for education prompts, is already committed to another launch.
Your Task
- Recommend the roadmap trade-off you would make and explain why.
- Build a 10-week execution plan, including scope decisions, dependencies, and launch sequencing.
- Define stakeholder management and escalation points for competing priorities.
- Propose launch success metrics, guardrails, and a rollback plan.
- Identify the top risks and how you would mitigate them.
