# Project plan

| **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**     | Sep 18, 2026                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 |
| **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)🤔 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)🎯 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)🗓️ Timeline

| **Phase**                     | **Dates**                  | **Focus**                                                                                          |
| ----------------------------- | -------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Discovery and validation      | Jul 6, 2026 – Jul 17, 2026 | Interview merchants and support agents, validate top failure reasons, and confirm reporting needs. |
| Design and technical planning | Jul 20, 2026 – Aug 7, 2026 | Complete dashboard UX, define event schema, and confirm data pipeline requirements.                |
| Build and internal test       | Aug 10, 2026 – Sep 4, 2026 | Implement dashboard, filters, exports, retry guidance, analytics, and reliability checks.          |
| Beta and launch readiness     | Sep 7, 2026 – Sep 18, 2026 | Run beta with 25 merchants, resolve priority issues, finalise enablement, and launch broadly.      |

## [#](#milestones-and-deadlines)🚩 Milestones and deadlines

| **Milestone**                                         | **Owner**     | **Deadline** | **Status**  |
| ----------------------------------------------------- | ------------- | ------------ | ----------- |
| Complete discovery interviews and opportunity sizing  | Amelia Clarke | Jul 17, 2026 | complete    |
| Approve dashboard design and analytics event schema   | Tom Bennett   | Aug 7, 2026  | in progress |
| Release beta to first 25 merchants                    | Jack Graves   | Sep 7, 2026  | not started |
| General availability launch and success-metric review | Priya Shah    | Sep 18, 2026 | not started |

## [#](#related-links)🗃️ Related links

* [Checkout failure research summary](https://example.com/research/checkout-failure-interviews)
* [Recovery dashboard prototype](https://example.com/designs/recovery-dashboard-prototype)
* [Payment recovery metrics dashboard](https://example.com/analytics/payment-recovery-metrics)
* [Support enablement playbook](https://example.com/enablement/support-playbook)