Systems Thinking and Interdependencies Questions

Understanding and reasoning about how decisions and changes in one part of a product, system, or organization affect other parts. This includes mapping technical, organizational, market, and user behavior dependencies; identifying feedback loops and cascading effects; anticipating unintended consequences; evaluating trade offs between local optimizations and global outcomes; designing for resilience, observability, and graceful degradation; and using diagrams, dependency graphs, and metrics to communicate systemic impacts. Interviewers assess the candidate for the ability to reason across boundaries, prioritize cross system trade offs, surface hidden coupling, and propose solutions that optimize overall system health rather than only isolated components.

MediumSystem Design

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Design a canary + feature-flag rollout for a new payments flow affecting frontend, payments-service, and fraud-service. Constraints: 10M active users, checkout must keep 99.95% success, and fraud false positives must not increase by more than 0.5%. Specify canary thresholds, metrics to watch, rollback triggers, and coordination checkpoints with fraud and infra teams.

EasyTechnical

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You're preparing a launch plan for a feature that touches three services. List the observability signals you would instrument before release (examples: latency, error rate, business conversions). Explain how you would map system metrics to business metrics and propose 3 SLOs you would publish for the launch.

HardTechnical

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Design a scoring system to surface coupling-related technical debt across product areas. Include dimensions like blast-radius, occurrence-frequency, customer-impact, fix-effort, and ownership maturity. Provide an example scoring formula, describe how the scores feed into roadmap prioritization, and how you'd convince stakeholders to allocate time for fixes.

HardTechnical

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You inherit a product with poor documentation of service interactions. Design a 3-month program to discover dependencies and quantify coupling using distributed traces, traffic analysis, owner interviews, and heatmaps. Describe the outputs, coupling metrics you would produce, and how you would convert findings into a prioritized decoupling roadmap.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

Architect a globally distributed notification system serving 500M users and 1B notifications/day. Requirements: respect user preferences, per-user rate limits, multi-region failover, analytics logging, and strong privacy boundaries. As a PM, outline trade-offs between consistency and latency, routing strategies, throttling policies, and a phased rollout plan.

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