Influence and Stakeholder Management Questions

The ability to persuade and align peers, leaders, and cross functional teams when you do not have direct authority, while managing stakeholder expectations and trade offs. This includes stakeholder mapping and analysis, building coalition support, framing recommendations to address different stakeholder priorities, and adapting messaging for technical, operational, or executive audiences. Candidates should be able to describe concrete approaches such as listening to constraints, using data and evidence to support proposals, negotiating trade offs, sequencing outreach before decision meetings, resolving disagreement and conflict, and demonstrating vulnerability and learning when plans change. Assessment covers influencing across teams, securing prioritization and resources, achieving stakeholder alignment on product or platform decisions, presenting to executives, and measuring follow through and outcomes.

MediumTechnical

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Create a post-incident review presentation template tailored to three audiences: engineers, customer support, and executives. For each audience list required sections (e.g., timeline, root cause, action items) and specify how you'd present action items, impact, and learning differently across these audiences.

MediumTechnical

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You need to persuade service owners to accept a proposed change that increases monthly cloud cost by 10% but reduces P95 latency by 30%. Outline how you would present this trade-off to a technical engineering team and separately to a product manager focused on user retention. What data and framing would you use for each audience?

EasyTechnical

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Compare how you would frame the same SRE recommendation — reduce tail latency by implementing circuit breakers — for three audiences: service engineers, product managers, and executive leadership. Provide one-line example messages for each audience and explain which metrics or narratives you'd emphasize for persuasion.

HardTechnical

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Senior engineering managers question the value of SRE practices. Draft a six-month strategic plan to demonstrate SRE value using focused experiments, dashboards that matter to managers, and stakeholder engagement rituals that culminate in a measurable ask for resources. Include which experiments you would run and how you'd track success.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

You're the incident commander for a major outage. Multiple teams are pointing fingers and stakeholders are demanding immediate explanations. How would you manage incident communication to internal teams and external stakeholders to avoid blame, maintain trust, and enable fast resolution? Provide specific example lines or templates you would use for status updates.

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