You are leading delivery of a real-time notification system for a large sports platform so users receive live match events such as goals, red cards, kick-off, half-time, and full-time with very low delay. The feature matters because it drives repeat engagement during live events, but it must launch ahead of a major tournament with no tolerance for a noisy or unreliable experience. The work is tricky because the event feed is already used by other critical live surfaces, mobile clients on iOS and Android are on different release cadences, and the operations team is concerned about traffic spikes when multiple high-profile matches overlap. Senior leadership wants broad coverage on day one, while engineering is warning that personalization, user preferences, and delivery guarantees may need to be phased.
| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Backend engineers | 6 |
| Mobile engineers | 4 |
| Web engineers | 2 |
| QA engineers | 2 |
| SREs | 2 |
| Peak concurrent users | 4.5 million |
| Peak notification fan-out | 1.2 million messages/minute |
| Deadline | 12 weeks |
| Budget for external tooling | £180,000 |
| Supported event types at launch | Goal, red card, kick-off, half-time, full-time |
How would you plan and execute this launch, including what you would ship first, how you would de-risk scale and reliability, and how you would define success for the rollout?
Roadmapping under a fixed deadlineTrade-offs between scope and reliabilityRisk assessment for scale and operational failure modesLaunch planning across backend, clients, QA, and SREClear success criteria and rollout gates