Practices for building and maintaining relationships with stakeholders, achieving alignment on goals scope timelines and success criteria, and managing expectations across functions and levels. Topics include tailoring communication and metrics to different audiences, negotiating trade offs and realistic timelines, coaching partners on prioritization, documenting decisions and governance, handling scope creep and midstream changes, maintaining transparency with roadmaps status reports and decision logs, and establishing escalation protocols. Candidates should show tactics for earning buy in without formal authority, coordinating operational handoffs, protecting teams from unnecessary friction, and measuring the health and effectiveness of stakeholder relationships and long term alignment.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a cross-functional escalation simulation (game-day) exercise for SRE, development, product, and support teams. Define objectives, several realistic scenarios (for example: regional outage, data loss, third-party failure), participant roles and responsibilities, success criteria, debrief and remediation format, recommended frequency, and the metrics you will use to measure improvement over successive exercises.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
During a migration project, stakeholders repeatedly add features that cause scope creep and push the schedule. Describe specific tactics to manage scope: a change-control process, a prioritization framework (name one), communication cadence with stakeholders, and how you'd enforce agreed boundaries while maintaining goodwill.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Executive leadership proposes temporarily suspending error budget enforcement to accelerate feature delivery for a quarter. As an SRE leader, outline a tactical and strategic response: immediate mitigations, data-driven arguments you would present, compromise options (timeboxed experiments), communication plan to stakeholders, and long-term governance changes to prevent recurrence.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
You need to run a recurring cross-functional reliability meeting. Define the agenda, mandatory attendees, required pre-work, decision rules (who decides what), meeting outputs, and how you will ensure measurable follow-up so meetings avoid becoming a status dump.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Describe who 'stakeholders' are for an SRE team in a typical organization. List at least six stakeholder types (for example: product managers, on-call engineers, sales, customer-success, legal, executives) and explain why each stakeholder matters to SRE priorities. For each stakeholder, provide one preferred communication channel and one primary concern they will usually have about reliability.
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