Launch Self-Serve Returns Before Peak

Project Context

ShopLane, a mid-market ecommerce platform, wants to launch a self-serve returns portal for merchants before the holiday peak. The feature is expected to reduce support costs, improve merchant retention, and unlock a planned Q4 sales campaign. You are the program manager leading a 10-person cross-functional team spanning product, engineering, design, QA, and operations, with a hard launch target in 12 weeks.

Key Stakeholders

The VP of Product wants a full-featured launch in time for the annual customer conference. The Head of Support wants the portal live early because return-related tickets now make up 28% of inbound volume. The Engineering Manager is concerned about reliability because the team is also supporting a checkout migration. The Sales Director has already told three strategic merchants that branded return flows will be available at launch.

Constraints

The project has a remaining budget of $180,000 and no approval for additional headcount. The team includes 4 engineers, 1 designer, 1 QA lead, 1 data analyst, 1 support operations lead, and 2 product/program roles. The launch date is fixed for October 1, with only one two-week buffer before holiday code freeze. The portal depends on a third-party shipping label API that is not yet certified in production and an internal order service that currently has a 1.8% timeout rate during peak traffic.

Complications

1. One senior backend engineer will be out for two weeks starting in Week 5.
2. Legal has raised concerns about refund policy disclosures in California and New York.
3. The branded returns experience promised by Sales requires custom theming work that was not included in the original scope.

Deliverables

1. Build a 12-week execution plan from kickoff to deployment, including major dependencies and decision points.
2. Recommend what should be included in MVP versus deferred to a later phase.
3. Define stakeholder communication and escalation paths for timeline or scope risks.
4. Propose launch readiness criteria, rollback conditions, and first-30-day monitoring metrics.
5. Identify the top project risks and how you would mitigate them.