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72-Hour Product Launch Recovery Plan

You are the interim project lead for a mid-sized SaaS company. Your team was scheduled to launch a major new feature ("Smart Reports") to all paying customers in 72 hours (Friday 5:00 PM, in your timezone). It is now Tuesday 5:00 PM. This morning, the following problems surfaced simultaneously: 1. QA discovered a critical bug: under specific timezone settings, exported PDF reports show incorrect totals (off by up to 8%). Reproduction is reliable; root cause is suspected but not confirmed. 2. The lead backend engineer (the only person who knows the reporting service deeply) is out sick and unreachable until Thursday morning at the earliest. 3. Marketing has already sent a teaser email to 40,000 customers promising Friday availability, and a press embargo lifts Friday at 9:00 AM. 4. Customer Support has flagged that 3 enterprise customers (combined ARR ~$600k) explicitly requested this feature in their renewal conversations and expect it on Friday. 5. Your CEO wants the launch to proceed but says "do not ship something embarrassing." Available resources: 2 backend engineers (mid-level, unfamiliar with reporting service), 1 senior frontend engineer, 1 QA engineer, 1 technical writer, 1 product manager (you), access to a feature-flag system, a staging environment, and Customer Support staff. Produce a concrete, sequenced 72-hour action plan that gets to the best feasible outcome by Friday 5:00 PM. Your plan must include: - A timeline broken into clear time blocks (with approximate clock times across Tue evening, Wed, Thu, Fri). - Specific owners for each action (by role). - Decision points / go-no-go gates with explicit criteria. - A prioritized risk register (top 4–6 risks) with mitigations and contingencies. - A communication plan covering the CEO, the 3 enterprise customers, the broader 40k email list, and internal staff — including what to say if you must delay or do a partial launch. - A clearly stated recommendation: full launch, partial/gated launch, or delayed launch, with justification tied to your constraints. Keep the plan realistic and actionable. Avoid generic advice; tie every action to the constraints above.