Leadership Principles and Decision Making Questions

Explain your core leadership philosophy and the leadership principles that guide how you lead teams, make trade offs, and set priorities. Cover how you empower your team, set expectations, hold people accountable, build trust, and maintain psychological safety. Describe how your leadership aligns with common company leadership frameworks and values, how your approach has evolved over time, and how you surface and mitigate your blind spots. Also include your decision making orientation as it relates to leadership: how you balance speed versus rigor, who you involve in decisions, how you make choices with incomplete information, and how you manage risk and conflicting stakeholder priorities while preserving team alignment.

MediumTechnical

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When multiple teams request changes to ownership of a data product, how do you evaluate ownership boundaries and decide whether to move ownership? Describe the criteria, migration plan, handover checklist, and how you maintain SLAs during the transfer.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

How do you evaluate whether a persistent data-quality issue is caused by people/process (e.g., improper usage, missing tests) versus a systemic tool/platform problem? Walk through investigative steps, what data or logs you examine, who you involve, and how you decide between process change and platform investment.

HardTechnical

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You're tasked with shifting the organization from reactive firefighting to proactive capacity planning for data workloads. Describe the organizational changes, required tooling, forecasting techniques, governance, and the approach you'd use to gain buy-in from teams used to ad-hoc scaling.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

You must decide whether to prioritize a quick workaround to unblock analytics for a high-value stakeholder (short-term fix) or invest three weeks in a robust refactor that prevents recurring data quality incidents. Walk through your decision-making process: what data you gather, who you involve, how you measure risk and cost, and how you communicate the trade-off.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

You need to influence other senior leaders to adopt a standardized data lineage system company-wide. Some teams resist because of perceived extra work and loss of flexibility. Draft an influence plan that includes stakeholder mapping, pilot design, incentives, and measurable ROI to secure buy-in.

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