Interview Guides
You are the engineering manager leading a checkout upgrade for a high-traffic e-commerce app ahead of the holiday peak. The release combines a faster payment flow, updated promo-code handling, and backend changes to inventory reservation, and leadership has tied the launch to a revenue target for the quarter. Two weeks before code freeze, end-to-end testing shows intermittent failures in edge cases affecting split shipments and gift cards, while the current checkout also has known latency issues that are hurting conversion. The head of product wants the full experience live before the marketing campaign starts, but the reliability lead is pushing to delay until the defect rate is lower because rollback during peak traffic would be risky. You need to decide what quality bar is non-negotiable, what scope can move, and how to launch without creating an outage or a poor customer experience.
| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Deadline | 6 weeks to holiday campaign launch |
| Engineering team | 6 backend, 4 frontend, 2 mobile, 2 QA |
| Current checkout traffic | 1.8M sessions/week |
| Current checkout conversion | 3.9% |
| Known critical defect area | Split shipments + gift card combinations |
| Rollback tolerance | Must restore prior flow within 15 minutes |
| Peak traffic increase expected | 2.3x baseline |
| Budget | No additional headcount approved |
How would you plan and execute this launch, including the trade-off you would make between speed and quality, how you would communicate that decision, and how you would reduce risk before and after release?
