This topic assesses a candidate's ability to take ownership of problems and projects and to drive them through end to end delivery to measurable impact. Candidates should be prepared to describe concrete examples in which they defined goals and success metrics, scoped and decomposed work, prioritized features and trade offs, made timely decisions with incomplete information, and executed through implementation, launch, monitoring, and iteration. It covers bias for action and initiative such as identifying opportunities, removing blockers, escalating appropriately, and operating with autonomy or limited oversight. It also includes technical ownership and execution where candidates explain technical problem solving, architecture and implementation choices, incident response and remediation, and collaboration with engineering and product partners. Interviewers evaluate stakeholder management and cross functional coordination, risk identification and mitigation, timeline and resource management, progress tracking and reporting, metrics and impact measurement, accountability, and lessons learned when outcomes were imperfect. Examples may span documentation or process improvements, operational projects, medium sized feature work, and complex or embedded technical efforts.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
How would you manage stakeholder expectations when a prioritized operational project you own will delay roadmap feature deliveries by one sprint? Explain what you'd communicate to engineering, product, and leadership; what trade-offs you'd present; how you'd measure and report progress; and how you'd mitigate perceived risk to feature timelines.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
A team consistently misses deadlines for reliability work. As the SRE owner, propose process changes to improve delivery predictability: suggest changes to workflow, definition of done, estimation practices, WIP limits, and success metrics. Explain how you'd pilot these changes and measure improvement.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Create a one-page briefing to get cross-functional buy-in for adding a circuit breaker at the API gateway to reduce cascading failures. The briefing should include: problem statement, proposed technical change, expected benefits (quantified where possible), risks and mitigations, timeline, rollback plan, and success metrics for the pilot and full rollout.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You are the senior SRE tasked with reducing Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) by 50% across all services in 6 months. Propose a company-wide program: list initiatives (automation, runbook coverage, on-call training, tooling), how you'd pilot and measure each initiative, required investments (headcount, tools), and how you'd prioritize services for maximum impact.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Provide a practical rubric for prioritizing a backlog of reliability tasks (examples: add alert for 5xx, scale DB read replica, optimize expensive query, improve runbook). List the fields in your rubric (e.g., impact, effort, risk, error-budget-consumption, stakeholder urgency), explain scoring, and show how you'd rank tasks using that rubric.
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