Time Management and Prioritization Questions

Assesses how a candidate plans, prioritizes, and executes multiple tasks under constraints. Includes frameworks for prioritization such as urgency versus importance, service level considerations, handling concurrent customer requests, triage and escalation strategies, balancing speed and quality, calendar and workload management techniques, setting boundaries, and strategies for sustained productivity and energy management. Interviewers will probe for concrete approaches, examples of handling competing demands, trade offs made, and how the candidate ensures high quality under volume or time pressure.

MediumTechnical

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A sales ETL job takes 30 minutes to run nightly and frequently blocks downstream jobs. Propose a plan to optimize the pipeline: outline root-cause analysis steps, short-term mitigations, and longer-term architecture changes (partitioning, incremental loads, refactoring queries) to reduce runtime and risk to other jobs.

HardSystem Design

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Architect a near-real-time analytics pipeline to support dashboards that must reflect events within 5 minutes for a system producing 10 million events per day. Discuss trade-offs between latency, cost, fault tolerance, and complexity; identify components (ingest, stream processing, materialized views), and explain how you would prioritize analytics and engineering work to deliver on a tight schedule.

EasyTechnical

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As a mid-level Data Analyst, how do you decide which tasks to delegate to junior analysts or to data engineers? Describe criteria for delegation, documentation and acceptance criteria you would require, and how you would validate delivered work while ensuring learning opportunities.

EasyTechnical

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You are a Data Analyst and receive three simultaneous requests: (1) a production dashboard is failing and must be restored, (2) a Sales VP requests an ad-hoc cohort analysis due in 4 hours for a customer call, and (3) a scheduled weekly report is due in 2 hours. Describe step-by-step how you would triage, assign owners, set SLAs, and communicate trade-offs to stakeholders given limited team bandwidth.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Your team has an SLA to deliver daily dashboards by 9:00 AM. Today a data source is delayed and the dashboards will be late. Explain how you would communicate with stakeholders, triage the root cause, and prioritize actions to either meet the SLA or minimize stakeholder impact. Include short-term mitigations and long-term fixes.

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