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Show Progress on Invisible Work

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Your question is Show Progress on Invisible Work. Take a moment with it on the right.

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Problem

Project Background

Notion's Platform team is rebuilding its permissions service to support enterprise-grade access controls for large customers. The work is foundational infrastructure, spans multiple quarters, and will not produce a customer-facing feature until the final migration is complete. You are the program manager for a 10-person cross-functional team and need to prove steady progress to leadership over the next 16 weeks.

Key Stakeholders

The VP of Engineering wants predictable delivery and early warning on schedule risk. The Head of Sales wants visible proof points because two enterprise deals worth $3.2M ARR depend on the new permissions model by the end of Q3. The Security lead cares more about auditability and zero regression risk than speed, while the Product lead is pushing for a parallel customer-facing feature that competes for the same engineers.

Constraints

The team includes 6 engineers, 1 tech lead, 1 QA engineer, 1 security engineer shared at 40% allocation, and you as PM. Budget for external support is capped at $85,000. The project must hit a go/no-go review in Week 8 and production readiness in Week 16. Three upstream dependencies exist: identity service API changes due in Week 5, infra capacity approval by Week 6, and security review sign-off by Week 10.

Complications

  1. The work is mostly backend refactoring and migration tooling, so progress is not obvious to non-technical stakeholders.
  2. One senior engineer is allocated 30% to production incident support for the legacy permissions system.
  3. Sales is asking for a customer demo by Week 6, even though no UI changes are planned.

Your Task

  1. Define how you would measure and communicate progress for long-term, low-visibility work.
  2. Build a 16-week execution plan with milestones, owners, and dependency management.
  3. Propose a stakeholder update structure that keeps leadership confident without overstating certainty.
  4. Identify the top risks to delivery and how you would mitigate them.
  5. Recommend what proof points you would use at the Week 8 go/no-go review.