Project Context
You are the program manager for PayWave, a large e-commerce marketplace with 45M monthly active buyers and $3.2B/month in GMV across North America, LATAM, and Europe. Fraud losses have risen from 11 bps to 19 bps of GMV over the last two quarters, driven by account takeover and synthetic identity. The CFO has asked for an aggressive plan to reduce fraud losses by 6 bps before the next earnings cycle.
The Fraud & Risk org has built a new ML-based decisioning service (“RiskScore v2”) that can block or step-up suspicious transactions in real time. The service is technically ready for a limited rollout, but the launch requires coordinated changes across checkout UX, customer support workflows, data pipelines, and market-specific compliance approvals. Leadership has created a weekly Steering Committee (SteerCo) to govern scope, timeline, and risk acceptance. You are responsible for SteerCo materials and the executive dashboard that will be used to make go/no-go decisions.
Team & Operating Model
The cross-functional team is distributed across 5 time zones:
| Function | Team Size | Notes |
|---|
| Backend Engineering (Risk) | 6 | Owns scoring service + rules engine |
| Data Engineering | 3 | Owns feature pipelines + monitoring tables |
| Data Science | 4 | Owns model performance + drift monitoring |
| Checkout Product + Design | 2 | Owns step-up UX (3DS / OTP) |
| Compliance + Legal | 2 | Reviews adverse action messaging, GDPR/consumer protection |
| Customer Support Ops | 2 | Updates playbooks, macros, escalation paths |
| SRE | 1 (shared) | Owns reliability reviews and incident response |
Stakeholder Landscape (Competing Priorities)
- CFO (SteerCo chair) wants measurable fraud reduction quickly and is willing to accept some customer friction if it improves loss rate before earnings.
- VP of Product (Checkout) is worried about conversion impact and insists on guardrails by device type and market.
- Head of Compliance (EU) is risk-averse: requires documented rationale for declines, retention policies for model features, and country-by-country review for the 6 EU markets.
- Director of Customer Support expects a surge in “why was my payment declined?” contacts and wants tooling + macros shipped before any meaningful ramp.
- Engineering Director (Risk) is short-staffed due to an unrelated Sev-2 incident stream on the legacy rules engine and pushes back on “extra reporting” overhead.
Your SteerCo materials must help these leaders make trade-offs quickly without drowning the team in status theater.
Constraints
- Timeline: 10 weeks to reach “broad availability” in 12 markets (US, CA, MX, BR, AR, UK, FR, DE, ES, IT, NL, SE). Earnings call is in week 11.
- Capacity: No new headcount approved. SRE is shared and only available ~25%.
- Data readiness: Two high-signal features (device fingerprint and merchant velocity) are only available in 7/12 markets due to vendor coverage and data residency.
- Compliance: EU markets require updated customer messaging and retention documentation; Legal review SLA is 5 business days per iteration.
- Business guardrails: Checkout requires that conversion drop be <0.30% absolute in any market during ramp.
What You Need to Produce (Deliverables)
- SteerCo packet outline (1–2 pages): What sections you include every week, what changes week-to-week, and how you keep it decision-oriented.
- Executive dashboard specification: Define the exact metrics, dimensions, and drill-downs (e.g., by market, device, payment method) that will be shown, including definitions and data sources.
- RAG status + dependency model: How you will represent cross-team dependencies (data pipelines, UX, compliance sign-off, SRE readiness) and what triggers a status change.
- Decision log + trade-off framework: How you will capture decisions (e.g., phased rollout vs. all-at-once, feature parity vs. timeline) and present options with quantified impact.
- Launch readiness and rollback plan summary: What “go/no-go” criteria are required for each rollout phase, and what rollback looks like operationally.
Complications (Realistic Curveballs)
- Week 3: A high-profile merchant complains that legitimate orders were blocked in a pilot, and Sales escalates to the CFO. The CFO asks for a SteerCo-ready view of false positives by merchant tier within 48 hours.
- Week 5: Legal flags that the decline reason messaging for Germany may be non-compliant without additional wording. This could delay DE by 2 weeks unless you propose an acceptable interim approach.
- Week 7: Data Engineering reports the device fingerprint vendor will miss coverage for MX and AR until after the earnings call. Checkout asks whether you can still launch those markets without the feature.
Interview Prompt
Walk me through how you would create and run the SteerCo reporting system (packet + dashboard) so that executives can make fast, correct decisions. Be explicit about:
- What you would show on one page vs. what you would keep as supporting detail
- How you would ensure the dashboard is trusted (metric definitions, refresh cadence, ownership)
- How you would handle conflicting asks (CFO wants speed; Checkout wants conversion protection; Compliance wants certainty)
- How your materials would evolve from weeks 1–3 (planning) to weeks 8–10 (launch + ramp)
- What you would do when the complications occur, and what you would ask SteerCo to decide
