Create a launch plan for a high-risk Advertising feature for third-party sellers

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Amazon is a commerce, logistics, media, devices, and cloud company; its products include Marketplace, Prime, Prime Video, Alexa devices, ads, fulfillment, and AWS.

Amazon is preparing to launch a high-risk Advertising feature for third-party sellers. The feature affects how sellers promote products, allocate ad spend, interpret campaign performance, and potentially influence customer shopping experiences across Amazon’s marketplace. Because sellers depend on advertising for growth and Amazon depends on marketplace trust, the launch must be planned with strong operational discipline.

In this execution interview, you are expected to define how you would take the feature from readiness assessment through controlled rollout, monitoring, issue response, and broader availability. The plan should account for multiple stakeholders, including sellers, shoppers, Ads product and engineering teams, account managers, legal/compliance, customer support, finance, and marketplace policy teams.

The feature is considered high-risk, so the launch plan should not assume a simple ship-and-announce approach. Consider risks such as seller overspending, misleading performance reporting, degraded ad relevance, auction or bidding instability, policy violations, customer experience impact, support burden, and reputational damage if the feature behaves unexpectedly.

The experience should consider:

- Clear launch objectives, scope, and success criteria for sellers, shoppers, and Amazon Ads

- Owners, decision-makers, dependencies, and cross-functional responsibilities across product, engineering, operations, legal, support, and sales/account teams

- Readiness checks before launch, including technical validation, policy review, seller education, billing accuracy, reporting accuracy, and support preparedness

- Rollout sequencing, such as internal testing, limited seller cohorts, marketplace or category constraints, ramp criteria, and expansion gates

- Go/no-go criteria tied to operational, customer, seller, financial, and reliability signals

- Monitoring plans for adoption, campaign performance, seller spend, customer experience, system reliability, support contacts, and anomaly detection

- Incident response, rollback, seller communication, and escalation paths if the launch creates harm or instability

- Post-launch review process to assess impact, learnings, unresolved risks, and next-step decisions

Your goal is to present a structured launch plan that balances speed, seller value, customer trust, and operational safety. The interviewer is looking for how you sequence the work, coordinate teams, define decision gates, reduce launch risk, and ensure Amazon can detect and respond quickly if the feature creates unexpected negative outcomes.