Project Context
ShopWave, a mid-market e-commerce platform, must ship a tax receipt compliance update before a new state regulation takes effect in 6 weeks. The update affects checkout, order confirmation emails, merchant reporting, and finance exports. You are the program manager leading a 10-person cross-functional team across engineering, design, QA, legal, and operations.
The deadline is fixed: if the update is not live by June 30, ShopWave cannot legally process orders for merchants in that state starting July 1. The business impact is material: the state represents 11% of GMV and $4.2M in quarterly revenue. Leadership wants full compliance on time, while also protecting checkout conversion and avoiding disruption for large merchants.
Key Stakeholders
- VP of Product wants the launch completed by June 30 with no customer-facing confusion.
- General Counsel requires zero compliance gaps and will block launch if receipt fields are incomplete.
- Engineering Manager is concerned because 2 engineers are already committed 40% to a separate reliability initiative.
- Head of Sales is pushing for custom merchant branding in receipts for 5 enterprise accounts, even though it is not legally required.
- Support Operations Lead needs training and macros ready before launch to handle merchant questions.
Constraints
- Fixed timeline: 6 weeks
- Budget remaining: $95,000
- Team: 4 engineers, 1 designer, 1 QA lead, 1 legal counsel, 1 data analyst, 1 support lead, you as PM
- No additional headcount approved
- Must integrate with 2 external email vendors and 1 finance export partner
- Checkout latency cannot increase by more than 150 ms
Complications
- Legal guidance on one required tax field is still ambiguous and may not be finalized until the end of Week 2.
- One email vendor has a history of missing SLA commitments and may take 10 business days to approve template changes.
- Sales is escalating requests for branded receipts, which could add 2 extra engineering weeks.
Deliverables
- Build a 6-week execution plan with milestones, owners, and dependencies.
- Recommend scope trade-offs for meeting the deadline while staying compliant.
- Define stakeholder communication and escalation paths.
- Identify top risks, mitigations, and rollback criteria.
- Specify launch success metrics for the first 30 days after release.
