Technical leadership

What is a one-way-door decision?

A choice that is expensive to undo, such as a public API or a data model. It deserves more review than a reversible one.

What is a two-way-door decision?

A choice you can reverse cheaply. Decide it quickly, and spend the review time on the doors that lock.

What is a spike?

A short, time-boxed experiment to answer one technical question, thrown away or kept only if it earned a place.

What does scoping a project mean?

Naming what is in this delivery and what is not, so the date and the design refer to the same work.

What is a milestone?

A checkpoint with a visible result, early enough that a slip shows up before the final date.

What is a cross-team dependency?

Work your date needs from a team you do not control. It belongs on the plan, with an owner and a date.

What is the critical path?

The longest chain of dependent work. Speeding up anything off that chain does not move the end date.

What should an estimate include besides a number?

What was assumed, what is still unknown, and the range. A single day with no range hides the uncertainty.

What belongs in a risk list?

What could slip the date or the quality bar, how you would notice, and what you would do then.

Who is a stakeholder?

Someone whose goals the project serves or whose work it changes. They need the status, not only the people writing the code.

What makes a status update useful?

It names what shipped, what is blocked, and whether the date or the scope moved. A color only means something beside those three facts.

When do you cut scope?

When the date is fixed and the remaining work does not fit. Cut a whole slice that users can live without, and say so.

What do you do after a design you opposed is chosen?

Say the objection once, clearly, then carry out the decision. Re-opening it in every meeting wastes the review.

When should you still escalate a decision?

When the chosen design has a concrete failure, such as data loss or a broken contract, and the review did not address it.

What should be true before a rewrite is approved?

The old system's real failures are named, and the new one is sequenced so value ships before the old path is gone.

What is a strangler migration?

New behavior is built beside the old path and traffic moves over in slices, until the old path can be removed.

What does deprecating an API require?

An announced end date, a way for callers to move, and a check that callers have moved before you turn it off.

What is expand and contract?

Add the new shape while the old one still works, move callers, then remove the old shape. Both versions run in between.

What is a feature flag for in a rollout?

Turning the new path on for a slice of users, and off again, without shipping another binary.

What must a rollback still be able to do?

Return to the previous version and leave data in a shape that version understands. A migration can make that impossible.

What is a code review looking for?

Correctness, the failure cases, and whether the change matches the design. Style nits are secondary to those.

What is wrong with one person reviewing everything?

The team waits on that person, and the knowledge stays in one head. Spread reviews so others can approve.

What is a useful growth assignment?

Work that is a step past what someone has owned, with a clear reviewer, not a vague invitation to 'pick something up'.

What makes feedback something an engineer can use?

A specific behavior, the effect it had, and the next thing to do differently. 'Be more senior' names none of those three, so the engineer cannot act on it.

What is bus factor?

How many people have to be unavailable before a system cannot be changed or repaired. One is a risk.

What does owning a service mean?

The team can ship the service, run it, and answer for its failures, including the on-call and the reviews. A wiki line with a team name and none of those is only a label.

What is the point of an on-call rotation?

Someone is responsible for the live system at all times, and the load moves so it is not always the same person.

What is a postmortem for?

A written account of what failed, how it was found, and which changes will make that class of failure rarer.

What does blameless mean in a review?

The write-up names the gaps in the system and the process. It does not hunt for a person to blame.

What makes a postmortem action real?

An owner, a change in the system you can point at, and a date. The change is a guard, a test, or a default, and someone checks that it reached production.

What do three similar incidents say?

The fix after the first one did not remove the cause. The next action has to change the system, not only the runbook.

What is technical debt?

A shortcut that makes a later change slower or riskier. Name the interest: which future work it taxes.

What is a quality bar?

The checks a change must pass before it ships, agreed in advance, so 'done' does not depend on who is asking.

What do you change if the room waits for you to speak?

Ask for other views before you give yours. Otherwise the meeting records your opinion as the team's.

How do you challenge a more senior design?

Name the input, the scale, or the contract the design breaks, and what happens when it does. That failure is the objection, whatever the author's title is.

Why is a long string of green status a warning?

If nothing ever looks at risk, bad news is being saved for the end. Ask what would make the status yellow.

What is a decision log?

A short record of what was chosen, what was rejected, and why. It stops the same debate from restarting every month.

What is an RFC?

A request for comments: a proposal circulated so people who will live with the decision can object before it is locked.

What is a staffing risk?

The plan needs a skill or a number of people the team does not have. The date is fiction until that gap is closed or the scope drops.

What is a hiring signal?

Evidence from the interview that matches the work, such as a design the candidate can defend when you ask about failure, scale, and rollout.

What is interview calibration?

Reviewers compare how they scored the same kind of evidence, so one interviewer's 'strong' is not another's 'weak'.

What is a roadmap in this role?

The ordered bets for the next stretch. Each bet names the outcome it is for, so a task with no outcome has no place on it.

How do you present a tradeoff?

Name both options, what each costs, the constraint that decides, and which option you rejected. The rejected option stays in the decision record.

What belongs in a rollout plan?

Who watches, which number means stop, and the step that turns the change off. Those three are written down before the first user hits the new path.

What is a canary release?

The new version takes a small slice of real traffic first. You compare its errors and latency before moving the rest.

What is backward compatibility?

Old callers keep working after you ship. An added field they can ignore keeps that promise. Removing or renaming a field breaks the callers still on the old contract.

What is an API contract?

The request, the response, and the errors a caller is allowed to rely on. Changing it is a change to their system.

What is real delegation?

The other person decides inside a boundary you named: the goal, the constraints, and the choices that are theirs. You review the result against that boundary.

How do you say no to a request?

Name the outcome already committed and the work that would drop to make room. The answer is that drop, or a real date when the new request starts.