Project Background
Northstar CRM, a mid-market SaaS company, wants to launch a new SMB analytics dashboard before its annual customer conference in 8 weeks. The problem: leadership has aligned on the business goal, but requirements are still vague. Sales wants a broad feature set to support demos, Customer Success wants self-serve reporting to reduce support tickets, and Engineering wants to avoid committing to unclear scope.
You are the program manager leading a cross-functional team of 9 people: 4 engineers, 1 designer, 1 data analyst, 1 QA lead, 1 product manager, and you. The launch date is fixed because the CEO plans to announce the product on stage. Missing the date would weaken a key upsell motion for the next quarter.
Constraints
- Timeline: 8 weeks total, with a hard launch at the conference on June 30
- Budget: $120,000 remaining; no new headcount approved
- Dependencies: data platform team can support only 10 hours per week; legal review requires 5 business days; marketing needs final positioning 2 weeks before launch
- Current state: no approved PRD, 3 competing stakeholder requests, and only 60% of source data quality checks are automated
Complications
- The VP of Sales has already promised top prospects a customizable dashboard, but Engineering believes that is at least a 12-week effort.
- A critical data engineer is allocated 50% to an unrelated migration project and cannot fully switch.
- Leadership wants weekly progress updates, but key decisions on MVP scope are still unresolved.
Your Task
- Define how you would clarify requirements quickly and lock an MVP scope within the first 2 weeks.
- Build an 8-week execution plan with milestones, owners, and dependency management.
- Explain the trade-offs you would make if stakeholder requests exceed team capacity.
- Identify the top risks to launch and how you would mitigate them.
- Define launch success criteria, including what must be true on launch day versus what can be deferred post-launch.
