Project plan

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Driver

Michael Scott

Approver

Priya Shah, Head of Product

Contributors

Tom Bennett (Engineering Lead), Amelia Clarke (UX Research), Marcus Lee (Data Analyst), Sophie Turner (Customer Success)

Informed

Support leadership, Sales enablement, Operations, and the Northstar Checkout Squad

Objective

Launch a self-serve checkout recovery dashboard that helps small-business customers identify failed payments, retry recoverable transactions, and reduce support tickets linked to payment failures.

Due date

Key outcomes

  • Reduce payment-failure support tickets by 18% within 60 days of launch.

  • Recover at least £240,000 in failed checkout value during the first full quarter.

  • Achieve 35% weekly active use among eligible merchant admins.

  • Maintain dashboard load time below 1.5 seconds for the 95th percentile.

Status

in progress

#🤔 Problem statement

Small-business customers currently rely on support agents or exported payment logs to understand why checkouts fail. This creates delays, increases support volume, and leaves recoverable revenue unclaimed. We think that giving merchant admins a clear recovery dashboard with failure reasons, retry guidance, and trend alerts will reduce avoidable support contact and improve recovered revenue. We’ll know we’ve succeeded if support tickets fall by at least 18%, recovered failed-payment value exceeds £240,000 in the first quarter, and customer satisfaction for payment-related help improves by 8 points.

#🎯 Scope

Must have:

  • Dashboard showing failed-payment volume, value, reason codes, and retry eligibility for the previous 90 days.

  • Merchant-level filters for date range, payment provider, checkout channel, currency, and failure reason.

  • Guided retry recommendations for recoverable failures, including customer communication templates.

  • CSV export for finance and operations teams.

  • Usage tracking, error monitoring, and launch reporting for adoption and impact metrics.

Nice to have:

  • Automated weekly summary email for admins with high failed-payment volume.

  • Inline benchmark showing failure rate compared with similar merchants.

  • Saved filter views for support managers and finance users.

Not in scope:

  • Automatic payment retries without merchant review.

  • Changes to provider settlement logic or reconciliation rules.

  • Mobile-app dashboard experience beyond responsive read-only access.

  • Historical data migration beyond the previous 90 days.

#🗓️ Timeline

Phase

Dates

Focus

Discovery and validation

–

Interview merchants and support agents, validate top failure reasons, and confirm reporting needs.

Design and technical planning

–

Complete dashboard UX, define event schema, and confirm data pipeline requirements.

Build and internal test

–

Implement dashboard, filters, exports, retry guidance, analytics, and reliability checks.

Beta and launch readiness

–

Run beta with 25 merchants, resolve priority issues, finalise enablement, and launch broadly.

#🚩 Milestones and deadlines

Milestone

Owner

Deadline

Status

Complete discovery interviews and opportunity sizing

Amelia Clarke

complete

Approve dashboard design and analytics event schema

Tom Bennett

in progress

Release beta to first 25 merchants

Jack Graves

not started

General availability launch and success-metric review

Priya Shah

not started