Case Study

The Recovery Build

A Seasonal E-Commerce Product That Broke Twice — and Still Shipped on Time

0%
Final phase issues
113
Peak sprint (5 days)
7
External integrations

The Problem

A personalized video product had a hard seasonal deadline — December 24th. Seven external service integrations. A checkout flow. Multi-currency support. No room to slip.

This case study exists because not every build is clean. The value of a system shows when things go wrong.

What Was Built

A consumer-facing platform where customers purchase personalized video products. The system tied together video generation, payment processing, content delivery, affiliate tracking, email notifications, analytics, and social media attribution — seven external services that all had to work together.

Timeline: 37 calendar days (Nov 18 – Dec 24, 2025), 28 active build days.

What Went Wrong

Two Major Breakages

Build Quality Over Time (issues as % of work)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Nov 18-24   ██                              Clean start
Nov 25-30   ████████████████████████████████████████  💥 Checkout broke
Dec 1-3     █████                           Stabilized
Dec 5-9     ████████                        Peak push (controlled)
Dec 10-15   █████████████████████████████████████████ 💥 Regional deploy broke
Dec 18-24   ▏                               Clean close — 0% issues

            Two breakages. Two recoveries. Shipped on time.

First breakage (late November): Payment integration collided with multi-currency handling and content configuration. Everything broke at once.

Second breakage (mid-December): Regional deployment and quality assurance surfaced a different set of problems.

How It Recovered

The operator didn't scramble. Each breakage followed the same pattern:

  1. Stop. Identify what broke.
  2. Contain. Isolate the problem so it doesn't cascade.
  3. Fix. Address root cause, not symptoms.
  4. Resume. Move forward with the fix validated.

Between the two breakages, a 5-day peak sprint produced 113 units of work with issues staying controlled at 15% — proving that speed and quality aren't incompatible when the process holds.

The final phase (Dec 18–24) shipped with zero issues. Every problem from both breakage events had been resolved. The product launched on deadline.

Why It Matters

Perfect builds prove nothing. Any process looks good when everything works. The question is whether the system contains problems and recovers — or whether one breakage cascades into a death spiral.

This build broke twice, recovered twice, hit a peak sprint in between, and closed clean. The seasonal window was met. The product shipped.

The Recovery Arc
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

     💥                    💥
     │ ╲                   │ ╲
     │   ╲  recovery       │   ╲  recovery
     │     ╲               │     ╲
     │       ── sprint ──  │       ── clean close ✓
─────┴─────────────────────┴──────────────────►
  Nov 25                Dec 10            Dec 24

For business operators, the lesson is clear: resilience is more valuable than perfection. A system that can break and recover is more reliable than one that's never been tested.

Key Numbers

Metric Value
Build time 28 active days
External integrations 7
Major breakages 2
Final phase issues 0%
Deadline met Yes — Dec 24
Peak sprint 113 units of work in 5 days
Operator share 72%

References

  1. Keating, M.G. (2026). "Governor: The Sustainable Execution Constraint." Stealth Labz CEM Papers. Read paper
  2. Keating, M.G. (2026). "Stop, Pause, Reset: The Three-State Recovery Protocol." Stealth Labz CEM Papers. Read paper