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Product review abuse, fraud & risk operations

Seven Weeks to Delivery

A year-end leadership commitment could not wait for full automation. I built an operational bridge that delivered seller warnings on time while engineering continued the permanent solution.

Program ManagementFraudRisk

The Problem

A VP had committed to delivering a new seller warning capability before the end of the year. The request landed late, and on the normal development timeline the fully automated solution could not ship before the deadline.

Role
Program Manager

What I did

  • Separated the business objective from the technical solution. The real goal was sellers receiving warnings by year-end, not automation itself.
  • Designed a lightweight operational bridge: a temporary manual process with clearly defined criteria that let investigators identify eligible cases and issue warnings right away.
  • Built the bridge on the same business rules engineering was automating, so the work fed the permanent solution instead of duplicating it.
  • Ran both in parallel, so the business outcome landed while engineering kept building the automated capability.

The Outcome

Sellers began receiving warnings before the year-end deadline and leadership met its commitment, without compromising the long-term solution.

Deadlines don't always require changing the destination. Sometimes you just need to change the path.

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Laura Barry — Operations & Program Management
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