Project Context
Atlassian's Jira Cloud team is preparing a new Automation capability that lets project admins create cross-project rules from a centralized admin surface. The feature is intended to support an enterprise sales commitment tied to Q3 renewals, but the codebase also has a growing backlog of reliability work and developer-experience issues that are slowing the team down.
You are the Engineering Manager for a team of 10 engineers, 1 designer, 1 product manager, and shared support from SRE and data engineering. You have 14 weeks to deliver a launch-ready version for 500 design-partner customers. The challenge is balancing a near-term launch with long-term team health: the team has worked two high-pressure quarters already, on-call load is rising, and attrition risk has been flagged in the latest engagement survey.
Key Stakeholders
The Group Product Manager wants the feature in market before the end of the quarter to support enterprise expansion. The Head of Sales for Cloud Enterprise wants at least two marquee customers live by week 12. The SRE manager is pushing to reduce incident volume before any major launch. Your Director of Engineering has made it clear that sustained overtime is not acceptable and expects a credible plan for team health.
Constraints
- Timeline: 14 weeks, with no extension available
- Budget: $180,000 for contractors, tooling, and customer rollout support
- Team capacity: 10 engineers, but 2 are allocated 30% to production support
- Dependency: Atlassian Analytics instrumentation must be ready by week 6
- Reliability baseline: current automation job failure rate is 1.8%, above the 1.0% internal target
Complications
- Two senior engineers are the only people familiar with the rule execution service, creating a knowledge concentration risk.
- A recent internal survey shows 38% of the team reporting burnout risk if another quarter runs at the current pace.
- Sales has already socialized an aggressive customer timeline that assumes full feature scope, not a phased rollout.
Deliverables
- Build a 14-week execution plan that balances launch scope, reliability work, and sustainable team pace.
- Define what you would ship in the initial release versus defer, and explain the trade-offs.
- Propose a stakeholder communication plan for handling competing priorities and resetting expectations if needed.
- Identify the top risks to delivery and team health, with mitigation and trigger points.
- Define success metrics for both launch outcomes and team sustainability.
