Project Background
Altana is preparing a major upgrade to Altana Atlas that adds a new supplier-risk investigation workflow for enterprise customers. The feature is already committed to two strategic accounts and is expected to improve analyst throughput before the end of the quarter, but the engineering team has also been running at an unsustainable pace after two back-to-back launches.
You are the Engineering Manager for a team of 8 engineers, 1 product manager, 1 designer, and shared QA/data support. You have 10 weeks to deliver a production launch in Atlas, with a hard deadline tied to QBR commitments and renewal conversations. Leadership wants the feature shipped this quarter, while your director has made it clear that another crunch cycle will increase attrition risk.
Key Stakeholders
- VP Product wants the full workflow, including case templates, bulk actions, and audit history, in this quarter.
- Head of Customer Success needs a stable launch for two lighthouse customers already expecting early access.
- Engineering Director wants predictable delivery without burnout, quality regressions, or excessive tech debt.
- Platform team owns a dependency on the graph query service used by Atlas and has limited bandwidth.
Constraints
- Timeline: 10 weeks total, with customer beta by Week 7
- Budget: $120K remaining, enough for one contractor or limited vendor support
- Team capacity: 2 engineers are allocated 30% to production support for existing Atlas workflows
- Dependency: Platform team can provide only 1 engineer for 2 weeks to support graph query changes
- Reliability requirement: no degradation below 99.9% uptime for existing Atlas investigation flows
Complications
- One senior engineer has signaled they may take planned leave for 2 weeks during Weeks 5-6.
- Sales is pushing to add a custom export format for one lighthouse customer, even though it was not in the original scope.
- Recent engagement survey results show the team is fatigued after repeated deadline pressure.
Your Task
- Propose a delivery plan that balances the quarter-end launch with sustainable team health.
- Define what you would ship by beta, by GA, and what you would defer.
- Explain how you would manage stakeholder expectations when scope, quality, and team capacity conflict.
- Identify the top execution risks and how you would mitigate them.
- Define success metrics for both launch outcomes and team health.
