You are the engineering manager responsible for a quarter-end release of a new partner integration for a B2B SaaS platform, expected to unlock a committed revenue target and reduce manual operations work by 40%. Six weeks into the project, you discover the real bottleneck is not raw engineering capacity but a fragile review-and-deployment process centered on one senior engineer, plus repeated rework caused by unclear API contracts with the partner team. At the same time, leadership is pushing to keep the original launch date because customer commitments are already in motion, while the security team has introduced a late-breaking requirement that affects the integration design. You need to decide whether to preserve scope, phase the launch, or reassign work, knowing that a failed release would create customer escalations and burn trust across teams.
| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Engineers on project | 6 |
| QA engineers | 1 |
| Partner teams | 2 external teams |
| Time remaining | 8 weeks |
| Committed launch customers | 5 enterprise accounts |
| Current deployment frequency | 1 production release per week |
| Review dependency | 1 senior engineer approves ~70% of critical PRs |
| Security requirement | Audit logging and token rotation required before GA |
| Budget for contractors/tools | $60K |
How would you identify, communicate, and resolve this bottleneck while still delivering the most important business outcome on time? Walk me through how you would reshape the plan, manage stakeholders, and decide what to launch versus defer.