Innovation and Operational Excellence Questions

Assess how a candidate balances investment in experimentation and new technologies with the need to maintain operational reliability and long term maintainability. Topics include frameworks for prioritizing experiments versus platform stability, risk assessment for adopting new tools, rollout strategies such as feature flags and canary deployments, investing in automation and observability, managing technical debt, and creating feedback loops from production metrics to influence priorities. Interviewers will probe concrete examples of tradeoffs made, how outcomes were measured, and how processes were used to reduce risk while enabling innovation.