Software Development Lifecycle and Tradeoffs Questions

Covers fundamental software development lifecycle concepts and the technical tradeoffs made during product development. Topics include the lifecycle phases of requirements gathering and analysis, design, implementation and development, testing, deployment, and maintenance, and awareness of different lifecycle models such as waterfall, agile and scrum, and iterative development. Also covers practical engineering techniques and tradeoffs such as feature flags, split testing, blue green deployments, canary releases, technical debt, and how decisions affect velocity quality and maintainability. Emphasis is on understanding how individual engineering work fits into the broader process and how to reason about tradeoffs between speed cost scalability and code quality.

HardTechnical

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A deployed release included a database schema migration and after rollout 1% of transactions are failing. As PM, outline the immediate incident response: rollback vs roll forward decision factors, database-state considerations, customer communication plan, and long-term mitigation to prevent recurrence.

MediumBehavioral

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Describe a time you used post-release analytics to change the product roadmap. Which metrics moved, how did you interpret the data, which stakeholders did you convince, and what was the final outcome? Explain how you validated the decision.

HardTechnical

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Executives ask you to deploy to an additional region to reduce latency for APAC users. Create an ROI framework that evaluates infrastructure cost, latency improvement, revenue impact, and phased rollout plan. Describe minimal instrumentation and KPIs to validate the decision post-deployment.

MediumTechnical

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Engineering reports the product has 40% unit test coverage and the CI is flaky, while sales demands several new features for the next release. As PM, walk through your immediate decisions: do you freeze features, invest in test stability, re-scope the release? Explain how you'd allocate resources and adjust release criteria.

MediumTechnical

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As PM for the platform team, define an artifact repository policy: artifact immutability, semantic versioning, retention/cleanup rules, and how to support reproducible builds across environments. Include storage/cost considerations and hotfix procedures.

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