Project Context

Databricks is preparing a quarter-end release for Unity Catalog focused on two customer-facing capabilities: faster cross-workspace data sharing and improved lineage visibility in Catalog Explorer. Your engineering team owns the metadata service and permissioning layer behind both features, but the same codepath is responsible for several reliability issues and a growing backlog of technical debt.

You are the Engineering Manager for a team of 10 engineers, 1 TPM, and 1 QA engineer. The VP of Product wants both features available to design partners in 12 weeks because they are tied to expansion deals worth $6M in ARR. At the same time, the on-call burden has doubled over the last two months: the service missed its 99.9% availability target in 3 of the last 8 weeks, and engineers have identified 14 high-priority debt items, including flaky integration tests, slow permission-check queries, and an outdated deployment pipeline.

Key Stakeholders

The Group PM wants to maximize feature scope for the quarter. The Director of Engineering wants measurable reliability improvement and lower pager volume before approving broader rollout. Sales is pushing for committed dates to support renewals, while Support wants fewer incidents and faster mitigation steps.

Constraints

• 12-week timeline with no additional headcount
• Budget for contractors/tools: $120K
• Team capacity: 72 engineering points per sprint across 6 two-week sprints
• Two senior engineers are each allocated 20% to production support
• Design partner demo is fixed for Week 8
• Broad rollout decision is fixed for Week 12

Complications

1. A principal engineer argues that at least 6 weeks should be spent re-architecting the permissioning service before shipping anything.
2. One strategic customer has escalated a lineage performance issue and is threatening to delay renewal unless they see progress within 30 days.
3. The PM has added a late request for audit log export support in Databricks SQL, but the team has not sized it.

Your Task

1. Propose a 12-week execution plan that balances technical debt reduction with feature delivery.
2. Define what debt must be addressed now versus deferred, and explain your trade-offs.
3. Recommend how you would handle the late scope request and stakeholder pressure.
4. Set launch criteria for the Week 8 design partner demo and Week 12 rollout decision.
5. Identify the top risks, mitigation actions, and fallback plan if reliability does not improve fast enough.