Ship SMB Analytics MVP Fast

Project Background

Northstar CRM, a mid-market SaaS company, wants to launch a new SMB analytics dashboard before its annual customer conference in 8 weeks. The problem: leadership has aligned on the business goal, but requirements are still vague. Sales wants a broad feature set to support demos, Customer Success wants self-serve reporting to reduce support tickets, and Engineering wants to avoid committing to unclear scope.

You are the program manager leading a cross-functional team of 9 people: 4 engineers, 1 designer, 1 data analyst, 1 QA lead, 1 product manager, and you. The launch date is fixed because the CEO plans to announce the product on stage. Missing the date would weaken a key upsell motion for the next quarter.

Constraints

• Timeline: 8 weeks total, with a hard launch at the conference on June 30
• Budget: $120,000 remaining; no new headcount approved
• Dependencies: data platform team can support only 10 hours per week; legal review requires 5 business days; marketing needs final positioning 2 weeks before launch
• Current state: no approved PRD, 3 competing stakeholder requests, and only 60% of source data quality checks are automated

Complications

1. The VP of Sales has already promised top prospects a customizable dashboard, but Engineering believes that is at least a 12-week effort.
2. A critical data engineer is allocated 50% to an unrelated migration project and cannot fully switch.
3. Leadership wants weekly progress updates, but key decisions on MVP scope are still unresolved.

Your Task

1. Define how you would clarify requirements quickly and lock an MVP scope within the first 2 weeks.
2. Build an 8-week execution plan with milestones, owners, and dependency management.
3. Explain the trade-offs you would make if stakeholder requests exceed team capacity.
4. Identify the top risks to launch and how you would mitigate them.
5. Define launch success criteria, including what must be true on launch day versus what can be deferred post-launch.