Technical Strategy and Roadmapping Questions

Covers defining, communicating, and operationalizing multi quarter to multi year technical and engineering strategy that aligns engineering investments with product and business objectives. Candidates should be able to describe planning horizons, trade offs between near term delivery and long term investment, and how strategic direction maps to architecture and platform decisions. Topic coverage includes migration and modernization planning, assessing current state and technical debt, sequencing initiatives and milestones, prioritization frameworks and cost of delay thinking, capacity and resource planning including hiring and team structure, vendor evaluation and integration, compliance and data considerations, governance and operating model, and execution planning with timelines and review cadences. It also includes balancing feature delivery, reliability, platform evolution, developer experience, and maintenance; making the business case for infrastructure and platform investments; defining success metrics and objectives and key results and measuring outcomes; risk identification, mitigation and contingency planning; and communicating roadmaps and trade offs to engineers, product leaders, business stakeholders, and executives. Domain specific concerns such as cloud adoption, business intelligence roadmaps, and marketing technology integration are included as examples of how technical strategy varies by context.

HardTechnical

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Design a review and escalation process for quarterly roadmap reviews that guarantees timely decisions, clear owners, and escalation paths to the executive committee if cross-functional conflicts persist. Include artifacts required for a decision and time-boxed SLAs for responses.

MediumTechnical

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You need to build a business case for a platform investment that reduces average incident MTTR from 4 hours to 20 minutes. Outline how you would estimate costs, expected benefits (quantify where possible), payback period, and key assumptions. Include both direct (downtime) and indirect (customer churn, developer time) benefits.

MediumSystem Design

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Design an API governance model to prevent breaking changes across 20 internal services. Include versioning policy, deprecation timelines, ownership responsibilities, and a lightweight review process that avoids major delays for teams releasing changes.

EasyTechnical

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Explain the Cost of Delay (CoD) concept and give two concrete examples of how CoD would change prioritization between a customer-requested feature and a platform reliability improvement. Describe how you'd compute CoD in the absence of precise revenue numbers.

HardTechnical

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Three product lines request a permanent increase in platform team allocation; you have limited hiring budget. Propose a cross-functional governance and prioritization process to allocate long-term platform resources, resolve conflicts, and publish a transparent roadmap that product lines accept.

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