Stakeholder Alignment and De-risking a Home Page Product Ranking Initiative

Context

You are a data scientist asked by a PM to "rank products on the home page." Requirements are vague and timelines are short. The products have eligibility constraints and the company operates in a regulated environment. You need to align stakeholders quickly, minimize risk, and ship an MVP while planning for a V2 that may include machine learning.

Task

Specify the following:

1. Clarifying questions to elicit:
   • The true goal (e.g., acquisition vs. cross-sell vs. long-term value),
   • The eligible product set and constraints,
   • Compliance/legal requirements,
   • Success metrics and guardrails.
2. A negotiation plan for MVP scope (e.g., rules-based baseline + logging) versus a V2 ML model, including a 30/60/90-day roadmap.
3. Communication artifacts you will produce (e.g., PRD addendum with metrics, decision log, risk register), and how you will handle pushback when the PM’s preferred metric conflicts with risk/compliance.
4. A decision framework for trade-offs (speed vs. accuracy vs. fairness/diversity), including explicit no-go criteria.
5. How you will run a blameless postmortem if V1 underperforms and maintain trust with the PM.