Ship Seller Risk Dashboard Fast

Project Background

ShopWave, a mid-market e-commerce platform, needs to launch a new internal Seller Risk Dashboard before the holiday freeze in 8 weeks. The dashboard will help operations agents review suspicious sellers faster, but the underlying requirements are incomplete: policy rules are still being finalized, historical data quality is inconsistent, and two key integrations are only partially documented.

You are the program manager for a 9-person cross-functional team: 4 engineers, 1 designer, 1 data analyst, 1 QA lead, 1 product manager, and you. Leadership wants a usable v1 live before the freeze because fraud losses increased 18% last quarter, but there is no room for a full-featured build.

Key Stakeholders

The Head of Trust & Safety wants broad functionality immediately to reduce manual reviews. The Engineering Manager wants to limit scope because one backend engineer is already allocated 40% to production support. Legal requires audit logs for every seller action before launch. Customer Operations needs training materials at least 1 week before rollout.

Constraints

• Deadline: 8 weeks, with production launch required by November 15
• Budget: $95,000 remaining for contractors, tooling, and training
• Team capacity: 9 people, no additional full-time headcount
• Dependencies: policy team must finalize top 10 review rules by Week 2; data platform can provide only 2 ETL changes this quarter; SSO integration is owned by another team with a 10-business-day SLA
• Non-negotiable: audit logging and rollback plan must be completed before launch

Complications

1. Historical seller-risk labels are only 70% complete, so reporting requirements may change mid-project.
2. In Week 3, the VP of Operations asks to add bulk seller actions for launch, which was not in the original scope.
3. The SSO team warns that their integration documentation is outdated.

Your Task

1. Build an 8-week execution plan with milestones, owners, and dependency management.
2. Define what ships in v1 versus what is deferred, and explain the trade-offs.
3. Create a stakeholder communication plan for handling incomplete information and scope pressure.
4. Identify top risks, triggers, and mitigations, including a rollback approach.
5. Define launch success metrics for the first 30 days after release.