AA
ShopWave is rewriting its checkout platform to support one-click payments, split tenders, and regional tax logic before the holiday season. You are the program manager for a 10-person cross-functional team spanning engineering, product, QA, and security. The team has already made several technical decisions informally in Slack and design reviews, and leadership is concerned that those decisions are not consistently documented or revisited as requirements change.
The Engineering Manager wants fast delivery and minimal process overhead. The Staff Architect wants a clear record of trade-offs and decision owners. The Product Director cares about hitting the launch date for enterprise customers, while Security requires evidence that payment and data-retention decisions were reviewed before launch. These priorities conflict: more documentation improves governance, but too much process could slow delivery.
The launch date is fixed for 12 weeks from now, with a remaining project budget of $85,000 for contractor QA and tooling. The team includes 6 engineers, 1 product manager, 1 QA lead, 1 designer, and you as PM; no additional headcount is approved. Two external dependencies are critical: a payment gateway certification due by Week 8 and a legal review of data-retention changes due by Week 6. The team already has 14 open architecture and implementation decisions across API design, retry logic, observability, and PCI token storage.
