Work Tree, Aug 7 - 13, 2026

What moved

1. Entertainer development is stopped, deliberately. The client proposed inverting checkout from pay-after-approval to pay-before. Phase 1 is built on the current sequence, so everything under payment would have been rebuilt. Halted at Sprint 122 Refinement on 12 Aug, launch date held until Raouf or Julie give an explicit go-ahead. What now holds the SOW signature is Merit Legal's answer on non-compete 14-5 and IP 6.10, six days silent.
2. Apple Store: the earn module is confirmed, so the work is now operational readiness. The question is no longer whether earn lands, it is whether the store is fit to open. Ten readiness items are outstanding and eight of them are past SLA: the homepage banner still returns "product is not available" on click, product sort order does not respond to the admin field, the iPhone category landing page and the iPad category image are unconfirmed, the Arabic translation audit was never run, and nobody has verified that the 200 demo SKUs physically sit in the Riyadh warehouse. Saudia's product availability and packaging confirmation is still the stated launch condition, due the week of 17 Aug. Fresh client feedback landed this morning on Apple branding and category page layout. One constraint changed and has not been absorbed anywhere yet: on 11 Aug the client said the catalogue must fully mirror what Apple's official supplier in Saudi Arabia offers, and that launching with a partial list is not acceptable for the first official Apple Store in the region. That is the opposite of the plan of record, and if it holds, STC becomes a launch dependency rather than an expansion.
3. STC integration is waiting on one meeting, and the gate is on our side. The technical call between Merit and STC is Sarika's to schedule, but STC will not book it until they have Merit's filled BRD template, and that template is sitting with Akshay for review of the R1 to R6 acceptance criteria. So the thing holding STC is not STC. Under it, the STC contract itself is still unsigned with STC Legal past its stated window.
4. Promo Engine: Phase 1 scope ratified as one promo code, all users, all categories, for Saudi National Day. Reservation expiry, the operator warning and 19 Confluence review items all closed. PRD v1.9 published this morning. Build is deliberately running ahead of client confirmation due 20 Aug, because National Day is too close to wait.
5. Multi-currency: design closed, numbers not. Two tiers, Tier 1 digital-only and tax-exempt, conversion at the consumer price layer only, all backend processing stays in SAR. Engineering called their own estimates unreliable. The real breakdown lands 19 Aug, one day past the deadline.
6. Fulfillment and OTO: the first real date arrived, and it is a quarter late. Engineering put 26 December on end-to-end fulfillment against a Q3 plan of Sep W3, with Seller Payout committed for Sep W4 directly behind it. Nothing here is externally blocked: the OTO account is live and warehouse registration is done. The work is defined, ticketed and unassigned. The review Abdalrahman named as his blocker cleared this morning: Muneeb reviewed the implementation plan and left comments at 13:35 WIB. So what is left is assignment, and a date Fayez will stand behind, decided at a session tonight.
7. Rewards Portal and the global employee pilot cleared eight design questions between them, including tenant discount behaviour, the global catalogue model, WhatsApp OTP over SMS, and points not converting to cash.
8. Odoo ERP revenue booking started, weekly from 11 Aug. Where the calculation happens is settled: it computes in the warehouse and only the final revenue column exports to Odoo. My column sheet is due 18 Aug.
9. What did not move is the review queue. Three sprints close today. MSP 17 closes at 2 Done against 31 Under Review out of 53 tickets. Nothing there is stuck in development, it is stuck waiting to be looked at. Open chases stand at 117, of which 82 are past SLA.

What I am asking for

1. Hiring: no updates at all from Rita. The PM role briefs went to her on 8 July and nothing has come back since. If it helps, I will run it myself, sourcing through interviews, and bring you a shortlist. Tell me what you would need to make that possible.