Continuous Improvement and Operational Excellence Questions

Mindset methods and governance for ongoing process improvement innovation and scaling of best practices across teams and the organization. Topics include continuous improvement frameworks and disciplined problem solving such as Lean and Six Sigma, scanning for and prioritizing improvement opportunities, designing and running experiments, measuring and reporting outcomes, learning from failures, managing resistance to change, and scaling successful practices. Also covers operational excellence across functions including selection of enabling systems such as customer relationship management systems reporting dashboards and automation platforms, setting and tracking key performance indicators like cycle time time saved cost reduction error rate throughput customer retention and revenue impact, and building repeatable governance to sustain gains.

MediumTechnical

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You have five improvement opportunities: flaky tests, slow CI builds, missing documentation, manual release steps, and customer support backlog. Propose a prioritization using an impact-effort matrix and ICE scoring. Describe your assumptions, provide a ranked list, and say how you'd validate the prioritization with stakeholders.

EasyTechnical

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Describe the DMAIC cycle (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) and walk through how you would apply it to a recurring bug backlog problem in a web application. Be specific about deliverables at each stage and reasonable timelines you would set for a cross-functional team.

MediumTechnical

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You are planning a focused improvement program to reduce incident MTTR from 6 hours to under 1 hour for critical services. Outline the specific experiments, automation, runbook changes, and team training you would deploy over a 3 month program, and list the metrics you would track to evaluate success.

HardTechnical

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As a staff engineer, design incentive structures and governance to reduce metric gaming where teams optimize local KPIs but hurt global business outcomes. Propose detection mechanisms for gaming, changes to KPIs to better align incentives, and cultural or governance interventions to discourage gaming.

HardTechnical

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You plan an A B test to detect a 5 percent relative reduction in error rate when the baseline error rate is 0.2 percent. Detail the statistical power analysis including required sample size for common alpha and power settings, and techniques to increase power such as variance reduction, stratification, or hierarchical models while mitigating customer risk.

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