Project Background
ShopWave, a mid-market e-commerce platform, needs to launch a new internal Seller Risk Dashboard before the holiday freeze in 8 weeks. The dashboard will help operations agents review suspicious sellers faster, but the underlying requirements are incomplete: policy rules are still being finalized, historical data quality is inconsistent, and two key integrations are only partially documented.
You are the program manager for a 9-person cross-functional team: 4 engineers, 1 designer, 1 data analyst, 1 QA lead, 1 product manager, and you. Leadership wants a usable v1 live before the freeze because fraud losses increased 18% last quarter, but there is no room for a full-featured build.
Key Stakeholders
The Head of Trust & Safety wants broad functionality immediately to reduce manual reviews. The Engineering Manager wants to limit scope because one backend engineer is already allocated 40% to production support. Legal requires audit logs for every seller action before launch. Customer Operations needs training materials at least 1 week before rollout.
Constraints
- Deadline: 8 weeks, with production launch required by November 15
- Budget: $95,000 remaining for contractors, tooling, and training
- Team capacity: 9 people, no additional full-time headcount
- Dependencies: policy team must finalize top 10 review rules by Week 2; data platform can provide only 2 ETL changes this quarter; SSO integration is owned by another team with a 10-business-day SLA
- Non-negotiable: audit logging and rollback plan must be completed before launch
Complications
- Historical seller-risk labels are only 70% complete, so reporting requirements may change mid-project.
- In Week 3, the VP of Operations asks to add bulk seller actions for launch, which was not in the original scope.
- The SSO team warns that their integration documentation is outdated.
Your Task
- Build an 8-week execution plan with milestones, owners, and dependency management.
- Define what ships in v1 versus what is deferred, and explain the trade-offs.
- Create a stakeholder communication plan for handling incomplete information and scope pressure.
- Identify top risks, triggers, and mitigations, including a rollback approach.
- Define launch success metrics for the first 30 days after release.
