Cost Optimization and Business Acumen Questions

Focuses on the financial and strategic aspects of cost management and how cost decisions affect business outcomes. Topics include Total Cost of Ownership analysis, CapEx versus OpEx trade offs, pricing and revenue levers, customer and product profitability, volume drivers, vendor negotiation, zero based budgeting, working capital optimization, process improvement for cost reduction, and methods to quantify return on investment for infrastructure and product decisions. Candidates should be able to present recommendations that balance cost, performance, and risk, and to communicate quantified impacts and implementation feasibility to business stakeholders.

EasyTechnical

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List four pricing and revenue levers you would evaluate when designing a pricing strategy for a B2B SaaS product. For each lever, describe how it affects ARR, customer adoption, and margin, and give an example trade-off that a Solutions Architect should present to the product and sales teams.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Explain CapEx and OpEx accounting differences and how each treatment affects financial statements and KPIs such as EBITDA, operating margin, and free cash flow. Provide specific examples for infrastructure purchasing (on-prem) vs cloud subscription for a three-year horizon.

HardTechnical

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Build a 12-month cost-optimization roadmap for a client whose cloud bills have risen 40% YoY. Include quick wins (days–weeks), medium term (weeks–months), and strategic initiatives (months–12 months), required teams or roles, KPIs to measure progress, expected savings bands, and a risk matrix describing implementation risks and mitigations.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Explain FinOps in the context of cloud cost management and list three core FinOps principles. As a Solutions Architect, describe the first three concrete actions you would take with a client's finance and engineering teams to implement FinOps effectively.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

You're building a prioritized backlog to reduce cloud spend. Describe a scoring model to rank candidate optimizations by expected savings, implementation effort, business risk, and permanence of savings. Explain how this scoring enables trade-off decisions between many small quick wins and few large strategic projects.

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