Covers both technical and organizational strategies for growing capacity, capability, and throughput. On the technical side this includes designing and evolving system architecture to handle increased traffic and data, performance tuning, partitioning and sharding, caching, capacity planning, observability and monitoring, automation, and managing technical debt and trade offs. On the organizational side this includes growing engineering headcount, hiring and onboarding practices, structuring teams and layers of ownership, splitting teams, introducing platform or shared services, improving engineering processes and effectiveness, mentoring and capability building, and aligning metrics and incentives. Candidates should be able to discuss concrete examples, metrics used to measure success, trade offs considered, timelines, coordination between product and infrastructure, and lessons learned.
HardTechnical
78 practiced
A third-party authentication provider you depend on must be retired for compliance and cost reasons. As Product Manager, plan the migration to a new authentication provider or home-grown solution: phases, token compatibility strategies, user experience during cutover (login, SSO), monitoring and security validation, rollback plan, and how you will communicate changes to internal and external stakeholders to avoid disruption.
EasyTechnical
53 practiced
Define SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs and provide an example set for a critical user-facing API such as a login service (select concrete SLIs, set SLO targets and an SLA). As Product Manager, explain how you would set these targets, what telemetry you would require, how you'd use error budgets, and how SLOs influence roadmap prioritization.
HardSystem Design
56 practiced
Design an architecture for a real-time collaborative editor (similar to Google Docs) that must scale to 1 million concurrent documents with low conflict rates and robust offline synchronization. Discuss consistency models (operational transform vs CRDT), partitioning and sharding strategies, conflict resolution UX, storage and replication considerations, SLOs, and how to organize teams to build and operate the system.
HardSystem Design
84 practiced
Architect a globally distributed push notification system that must deliver 10 million pushes per minute, support personalization and A/B experimentation, enforce per-user throttling, and meet regional p95 latency targets under 200ms with 99.95% delivery success. As Product Manager, outline architecture options (fan-out, batching, local vs centralized queues), trade-offs between cost and latency, backpressure and retry strategies, vendor vs in-house evaluation criteria, SLOs, and a phased rollout and measurement plan.
MediumTechnical
56 practiced
Define a concise set of metrics and OKRs you would use as a Product Manager to measure successful scaling of both systems and teams over the next six months. Include leading and lagging indicators for reliability, performance (latency/capacity), developer productivity, and customer satisfaction. Propose target values where reasonable and a cadence for review and action.
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