Cross Functional Influence and Leadership Questions

This topic covers a candidate's ability to influence, align, and lead across organizational boundaries without formal authority. Candidates should demonstrate how they build and sustain credibility and trusted relationships with product, engineering, design, business, analytics, and executive partners to shape decisions, drive initiatives, and change culture. Assessment focuses on stakeholder mapping and prioritization, coalition building, negotiation and persuasion, tailoring communication and storytelling for different audiences, managing up and sideways, facilitating meetings and escalations, and aligning competing incentives. Evaluators will look for concrete tactics such as relationship building, data driven persuasion, compelling business cases, governance and accountability mechanisms, trade off negotiation, creation of scalable practices, and ways to measure and communicate organizational impact. The scope also includes executive presence, emotional intelligence, handling resistance and skepticism, recovering trust after setbacks, and sustaining cultural or operational changes across teams.

EasyTechnical

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Name and briefly describe four different methods an SRE can use to influence product priorities when SLOs are repeatedly missed after feature launches. For each method, include one potential drawback.

MediumTechnical

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A product team repeatedly deploys large schema changes directly to production causing incidents. As an SRE without formal authority, outline a cross-functional plan to change team behavior that includes policy, tooling, incentives, and escalation paths.

HardTechnical

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Design a longitudinal study to evaluate whether SRE interventions such as SLO enforcement, automation, and improved runbooks causally reduce customer churn over 12 months. Define control groups, primary and secondary metrics, data collection cadence, statistical tests, threats to validity, and how you would report results to leadership.

HardTechnical

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You lost trust after an SRE-led rollout caused an extended outage. Draft a recovery plan including immediate remediation steps, a transparent stakeholder and customer communication plan, a root cause investigation with accountability, and a six-month roadmap to restore trust with measurable checkpoints.

EasyTechnical

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When joining a new product area as an SRE, how would you map and prioritize stakeholders for an initiative to reduce latency spikes? List the steps, who you would interview, signals you would use to prioritize outreach, and how you'd decide which stakeholders to engage first.

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