Interview Guides
ShopWave, a mid-market e-commerce platform, is preparing a new one-page checkout intended to improve conversion before the holiday season. You are the program manager for a 12-person cross-functional team covering engineering, design, QA, analytics, and operations. The launch is urgent because leadership expects the feature to lift checkout conversion in Q4, but the team is already committed to too many parallel workstreams.
The VP of Product wants the full feature set shipped before the holiday code freeze. The Engineering Manager is concerned the team cannot deliver the current scope without quality issues and burnout. Sales is pushing for two enterprise-specific requests to close renewals, while Legal requires updated consent flows before launch. Analytics needs event instrumentation finalized early to support post-launch measurement.
The launch window is 10 weeks, with a hard code freeze at the end of Week 10. Budget allows only $60,000 of contractor support, enough for either 1 QA contractor for 8 weeks or 1 frontend contractor for 6 weeks, not both. The team has 6 engineers, 1 designer, 1 QA lead, 1 data analyst, 1 product manager, 1 legal partner, and you as program manager. Two engineers are also spending 25% of their time on production support. Current committed scope includes guest checkout, saved payment methods, promo code redesign, address autofill, tax calculation fixes, accessibility remediation, analytics instrumentation, and two enterprise customizations.
