Project & Process Management Topics
Project management methodologies, process optimization, and operational excellence. Includes agile practices, workflow design, and efficiency.
System Integration Project Management
Plan and execute integration of multiple infrastructure components and heterogeneous technologies across teams. Topics include integration patterns, application programming interface design and contract thinking, data format and schema management, dependency and interface management, phased rollout and deployment strategies, compatibility testing, rollback and fallback planning, staging and testing approaches, stakeholder coordination, and risk mitigation and communication strategies that minimize operational disruption.
Project Ownership and Execution
Ability to lead and deliver complex projects end to end, including defining the project charter and success criteria, creating and maintaining realistic plans, managing scope schedule and dependencies, coordinating cross functional teams, mitigating risks, and ensuring delivery quality. This also encompasses embedding a quality culture, attention to detail, balancing speed with polish, and examples of raising execution standards or introducing process improvements.
Time Management and Prioritization
Assesses how a candidate plans, prioritizes, and executes multiple tasks under constraints. Includes frameworks for prioritization such as urgency versus importance, service level considerations, handling concurrent customer requests, triage and escalation strategies, balancing speed and quality, calendar and workload management techniques, setting boundaries, and strategies for sustained productivity and energy management. Interviewers will probe for concrete approaches, examples of handling competing demands, trade offs made, and how the candidate ensures high quality under volume or time pressure.
Outcomes and Progress Tracking
Mindset and practices for defining success and tracking progress across projects programs and roles. Covers how to define measurable success criteria align work to objectives and key results and key performance indicators set baselines targets and guardrail metrics and choose appropriate review cadences. Includes team and agile measures such as velocity burndown cycle time sprint completion rates and capacity planning as well as program and product measures such as adoption usage business impact and technical health. Also addresses how to visualize progress with dashboards run regular tracking processes communicate status to different audiences and avoid misuse of metrics for punitive evaluation.
Windows Server and Enterprise Systems
Knowledge and operational practices for Windows Server and enterprise identity and infrastructure. Topics include Active Directory and domain controller concepts, group policy design and management, enterprise identity and access management, domain trusts and federation, patching and lifecycle management for Windows servers, backup and disaster recovery for on premises Windows workloads, and integrating on premises systems with cloud identity providers.
Reliability and Observability
Show familiarity with reliability engineering and observability concepts including monitoring, alerting, distributed tracing, logging, incident management frameworks, and runbooks. Explain practices for defining and measuring service level objectives, service level indicators, and service level agreements, as well as approaches to detect, diagnose, and resolve production issues. Describe how observability platforms, on call practices, and post incident reviews contribute to reducing mean time to detection and mean time to recovery.
Ownership and Project Delivery
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.
System Architecture and Distributed Systems
Assess understanding of system architecture and distributed system principles that drive technical program decisions. Topics include component decomposition data flow fault domains replication and partitioning strategies consistency and availability tradeoffs latency and throughput tradeoffs caching sharding load balancing scaling strategies capacity planning observability and failure modes. Interviewers evaluate how candidates articulate major design decisions justify tradeoffs reason about performance and cost and connect architecture choices to program scope timelines and risk.
Operational Excellence and Production Readiness
Understand production operational concerns and ensure programs include measures for operational readiness. Areas include monitoring and observability strategy, alerting and instrumentation, deployment pipelines and release strategies, rollback and canary plans, capacity planning, on call and incident response procedures, postmortem culture, and production runbooks. Explain how operational requirements and service level objectives influence scheduling, testing, rollout sequencing, and team capacity during program execution.