Prioritization and Stakeholder Alignment Questions

Covers frameworks and practices for prioritizing work, aligning stakeholders, and allocating limited resources across features projects and operational needs. Topics include impact versus effort and weighted scoring models, RICE and similar frameworks, sequencing dependent work, handling competing or conflicting priorities, negotiating trade offs with business and engineering partners, creating governance and escalation paths, communicating deprioritization decisions, and measuring outcomes to validate prioritization. Senior assessments include strategic resource allocation across teams and portfolios and techniques for building cross functional consensus.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Implement a Python function that accepts a list of features and a weights dictionary, normalizes numeric criteria using min-max normalization, computes a weighted score, and returns the features sorted by descending score. Input example:

| feature | business_value | effort | strategic_fit | risk ||---|---:|---:|---:|---:||A|80|20|5|2||B|60|10|3|4||C|40|30|4|1|

Note: effort and risk should reduce the score (treated as inverse). Handle missing values by imputing the median for that criterion.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Your company has three product lines and a single shared engineering pool. All product leads claim their initiatives are top priority. As Solutions Architect responsible for cross-product technical decisions, explain a repeatable approach to allocate engineering capacity across product lines, including scoring, WIP limits, funding models (e.g., capacity as a product), and governance to enforce allocations.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Design a governance and escalation path for prioritization decisions in a product organization where Solutions Architects, Product Managers, Engineering Leads, and Sales all have input. Include decision gates, RACI assignments, timeboxes for decisions, and how to handle urgent incidents that bypass normal prioritization. Explain how the framework avoids stalemate.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

You have a $5M discretionary budget and three competing initiatives: Platform Reliability (estimated uplift 2.5x cost), Enterprise Sales Enablement (6x ROI but high customization risk), and International Expansion (4x ROI over 18 months). As Solutions Architect, propose an allocation of the budget, justify trade-offs, and describe contingencies if one initiative underperforms.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

A regulator requires architectural changes that affect data handling and product behavior. Compliance work must be completed by law but will delay high-value features. As Solutions Architect, describe how you would prioritize compliance work against business initiatives, communicate with Product and Sales, and structure delivery to minimize business impact while ensuring legal timelines are met.

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