Prioritization Decision Record: Platform Team Q3

Everline Platform team -- Q3 prioritization decision record, following Worked Scenario 10's Q2 record. Everline, Priya Kapoor, and every named engineer below are fictional; every quote and number is an illustrative, constructed example, not a real planning document.

Competing demands this quarter

The Ingestion/Serving reorg (Worked Scenario 21): splitting the Platform team once it passes 10 people, with a predicted system-boundary hardening between the two new sub-teams.
The remaining two-thirds of the ETL rewrite (Worked Scenario 10 covered only the highest-risk third in Q2; the rest still causes occasional data-quality incidents, just less often).
Cross-team schema-registry contract testing (Worked Scenario 20's Bet 2, and the shared incentive Worked Scenario 18 already established with Morgan's Data Science team).

Options considered

Option A: do the reorg first, then contract testing, then the rest of the ETL rewrite, sequentially.
Option B: do contract testing first (before the reorg), then the reorg, then the ETL rewrite.
Option C: run the ETL rewrite and contract testing in parallel this quarter, deferring the reorg to Q4.

Option C was ruled out first: deferring the reorg doesn't remove the team-size pressure driving it, and every quarter of delay means more work lands on the current, already-strained team shape before the split happens. Between A and B, the deciding factor is Worked Scenario 21's own prediction: the reorg will harden the Ingestion/Serving boundary either around a versioned, contract-tested format or around whatever informal format happens to exist the day the split takes effect. Doing the reorg before contract testing is in place risks hardening the boundary around the wrong thing -- permanently, since undoing a hardened boundary is far more expensive than establishing it correctly the first time.

Decision

Option B: contract testing first, then the reorg, then the remaining ETL rewrite. The ETL rewrite absorbs the quarter's schedule risk -- it's the item with the most flexible timeline, since its incident rate, while nonzero, is already down from Q2's highest-risk-third fix.

Communication plan

To the Platform team: presented in the next planning meeting with Worked Scenario 21's Conway's Law prediction attached, so the sequencing (contract testing before reorg) reads as deliberate, not arbitrary.
To product: Priya tells product directly that the ETL rewrite's completion may slip later into Q3 than originally hoped, with the reasoning (reorg-boundary risk took priority) attached -- the same trade-off-communication standard as Worked Scenario 15.
Cross-team influence component, to Morgan (Data Science team lead): contract testing needs Data Science's participation to be effective, and Morgan doesn't report to Priya. The ask is framed around the same shared incentive Worked Scenario 18 already established -- Data Science was paged twice last quarter for exactly the failure mode contract testing prevents -- rather than asking Morgan to prioritize Platform's roadmap over Data Science's own.

Verify

The record states the options considered, the trade-off made, the decision, and the communication plan (satisfying co-10 and co-14), and the cross-team component names a shared incentive Morgan's team already holds rather than an appeal to authority or urgency (satisfying co-17).