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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.

MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Two regional teams disagree about failover criteria for multi-region DR; disagreement risks uncoordinated failovers. Propose an approach to align stakeholders, set shared failover criteria (metrics and thresholds), and a testing cadence that minimizes user impact while validating the plan.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Design the cross-functional migration plan from a push-based deployment model to GitOps for 30 services. Include stakeholder roles, migration phases, pilot selection, training curriculum, risk mitigation, automation artifacts to provide, and how you'd get product teams to prioritize migration work against their feature roadmaps.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
You're preparing a one-page cost-benefit outline to present to the CFO to fund migration to a managed database service. State the assumptions, estimate quantified benefits (engineering hours saved, downtime reduction value), outline risks (vendor lock-in, migration cost), and how you'd measure ROI within the first year.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Multiple dependent services have independently enforced SLOs that, under load, cause cascading throttles and failures. As SRE, propose a strategy to align stakeholders across teams, redesign SLOs or coordination policies, and test the solution safely to avoid cascading outages in production.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
You're replacing the company's observability platform; several teams rely on custom dashboards and alerts. Outline a coalition-building strategy to get engineering and data teams to migrate: who to recruit as early advocates, what incentives or support to offer, migration phases, and rollback or coexistence periods to avoid service disruption.

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