Interview Guides
You are the program lead for ShopSwift, a global e-commerce marketplace (~45M MAUs, 1.2M daily orders) with a fast-growing cross-border business. The company is launching “Instant Refunds”: when a customer cancels an order within 15 minutes (or a courier fails pickup), ShopSwift will issue an immediate refund to the original payment method. This is expected to reduce support contacts by 18% and improve repeat purchase rate by 0.6pp in key markets.
The catch: this program must be executed by a fully remote, globally distributed team spanning 8 time zones (Seattle, Austin, São Paulo, London, Berlin, Bangalore, Singapore, Sydney). The team has historically struggled with slow decision-making, duplicated work, and late discovery of integration issues due to limited overlap hours.
The CEO has committed publicly to a launch date aligned with a major brand campaign: 8 weeks from today. Missing the date means forfeiting $3.5M in prepaid marketing spend and delaying revenue impact into the next quarter. Meanwhile, the payments stack is shared with other initiatives and has strict reliability requirements (payments uptime target 99.95%). The program touches customer experience, payments processing, risk/fraud, finance reconciliation, and customer support tooling.
Your job is not only to create a plan, but to demonstrate how you would run execution with a remote team: alignment, communication cadence, decision-making, and risk management with limited real-time overlap.
| Constraint | Details |
|---|---|
| Timeline | 8 weeks to public launch; no date slip allowed without SVP approval |
| Team | 16 total: 7 backend, 3 frontend, 2 data, 1 designer, 1 QA, 1 TPM (you), 1 support ops; all remote |
| Overlap | Only 2 hours/day overlap between US and India; 0 hours overlap between US West and Sydney |
| Dependencies | Payment processor certification window every 2 weeks; fraud rules require review by Risk Council (meets weekly) |
| Reliability | Must not degrade checkout; refunds pipeline must meet P95 < 2 minutes for eligible cases |
| Budget | $120K for contractors/tools; no additional headcount approved |
| Scope | Initial launch must cover US, UK, DE, FR, AU (5 markets) with localized comms and support macros |
Provide the following, as you would in a real execution interview:
You should assume you have authority to set process and drive alignment, but not to add headcount or change the public launch date without executive escalation.
