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Technical leadership

A senior full stack engineer interview on leading a product team through feature ownership, build-or-buy calls, launches, escalations, onboarding, and rebuild decisions without formal authority.

These prompts are original practice. They are not questions from a named employer or a live hiring loop.

  1. 1.You are the tech lead for a small product team that owns a new team invitations feature end to end. Before anyone writes code, what should the design doc settle first?

  2. 2.Your design doc for a billing settings page has been open for review for two weeks. Comments keep arriving, but none change the core approach. What do you do?

  3. 3.Your feature shipped to all users a week ago. The product manager asks whether it worked, and you realize no success metric was ever tracked. What should you do differently on the next feature?

  4. 4.You are planning the rollout of a rewritten checkout flow that touches the client, the API, and the database schema. Which rollout plan fits best?

  5. 5.At 20 percent of a feature ramp, conversion on the new flow is 3 percent lower than the old one, while errors are flat. Launch is set for Friday. What do you do?

  6. 6.Two weeks after launch, your feature's metric moved as hoped. The flag and the old code path are still in place. What do you do?

  7. 7.Your feature's metric rose sharply in its first week, then slowly fell back over the following month. What do you do as its owner?

  8. 8.Support reports that a key flow in the feature your team owns fails on an older mobile browser. Analytics show those users are 6 percent of traffic. What do you do?

  9. 9.Your startup team of five needs transactional email with bounce handling for a launch in six weeks. One engineer wants to run your own mail servers. What do you recommend?

  10. 10.Your team is choosing between building search in house and using a hosted search service. Which question matters most for the decision?

  11. 11.You chose a hosted login vendor a year ago. Its price will triple next quarter. A teammate wants to start an in-house rewrite this week. What do you do first?

  12. 12.You are writing up a build-versus-buy decision for a file upload service. Which part of the write-up will help the team most a year from now?

  13. 13.A vendor's analytics kit covers 80 percent of your needs. Building around the gap would take two engineers a month. A senior engineer says to build everything in house. How do you decide?

  14. 14.Your team wants to adopt an open source job queue library kept up by one person and last updated 14 months ago. It passes your tests. What do you do?

  15. 15.You lead a team of four at a startup. The chief executive officer asks for a custom internal admin dashboard by next week. You think a hosted internal tool builder would do the job. What do you say?

  16. 16.Two weeks before a launch tied to a partner event, your team finds the new dashboard has almost no automated tests. The date cannot move. What do you do?

  17. 17.A week before launch, an engineer notices the API sends full user records, including emails and addresses, to the browser, which then filters them for display. What do you do?

  18. 18.Your startup is racing to its first launch. Which shortcut is the most reasonable one to take?

  19. 19.The product manager asks you to skip the design review to hit a launch date. The feature adds a new permission model. What do you say?

  20. 20.Your team ships fast, then spends days on hotfixes after most releases. Which change is most likely to improve both speed and quality?

  21. 21.Three days before launch, a teammate wants to restructure the data layer because it will be painful later. It causes no bugs today. What do you do?

  22. 22.Three days before launch, testers report 40 minor bugs. How do you handle them?

  23. 23.The day before launch, an engineer finds the schema migration takes a lock that could block writes on a large table for several minutes. What do you do?

  24. 24.Your team owns signup end to end. Marketing wants a new form field for a campaign in five days. Legal says the field needs review first. What do you do?

  25. 25.A large customer escalates: their exported reports show wrong totals. Sales wants an answer today, and you lead the fix. What do you do first?

  26. 26.You trace an escalated bug to a rounding difference between how the frontend shows a total and how the backend computes it. Which fix serves the customer and the team best?

  27. 27.During a customer escalation, the account manager joins the engineering channel and asks for updates every 20 minutes. Engineers are losing focus. What do you do?

  28. 28.You shipped a fix for an escalated bug, and the customer confirms it works. What should happen next from the lead's seat?

  29. 29.A customer escalation needs a database change, an API change, and a frontend change. Three engineers each know one layer best. How do you run the fix?

  30. 30.To settle an escalation, a sales lead promised a customer a new feature. Your team never agreed to it, and it conflicts with the roadmap. What do you do?

  31. 31.An escalation shows a page loads slowly only for accounts with thousands of projects. Your team never tested with that much data. What should change beyond the fix?

  32. 32.Two new hires join your team, which owns a large ten-year-old codebase. Which plan helps them most in their first two weeks?

  33. 33.New hires keep asking the same local setup questions in chat, and you spend hours a week answering. What do you do?

  34. 34.A new hire has been on your team three weeks and has not asked a single question. Their first pull request is still open. What do you do?

  35. 35.Your frontend has three different ways to fetch data. New hires keep picking the one the team is trying to retire. What is the most useful fix?

  36. 36.You want a new hire to own a feature by their second month. What is the best way to set that up?

  37. 37.An onboarding buddy on your team says they cannot keep helping the new hire and also hit their own deadlines. What do you do?

  38. 38.Two weeks in, a new hire proposes replacing the team's state management library. Their points are good, but they lack context. What do you do?

  39. 39.Your team built a prototype in three weeks to test demand. It now has 2,000 daily users, no tests, and one table holding everything. When should it be rebuilt?

  40. 40.Your prototype has to become a real product. Which approach usually carries the least risk?

  41. 41.Leadership asks why your team needs time to rebuild a prototype that already works. How do you make the case?

  42. 42.A teammate built a quick prototype for a customer demo. Sales wants to ship it next week. It calls a paid third-party API with a secret key embedded in the browser code. What do you do?

  43. 43.Your team kept a prototype's architecture after launch. Six months later, every feature takes twice as long as estimated. What is the best first step?

  44. 44.You are deciding whether to rebuild a prototype now or after a funding round in four months. What should weigh most?

  45. 45.You are leading the rebuild of a prototype's data model. Halfway through, the product manager asks for a new feature on the old model. What do you do?

  46. 46.In a design review for live notifications, a senior engineer strongly prefers polling over a persistent socket connection, which you chose. What do you do?

  47. 47.A design review has run three meetings with two engineers debating REST versus GraphQL for an internal API. Both would meet the needs. What do you do?

  48. 48.A junior engineer raises a concern in a design review, and the senior people dismiss it quickly. You think it has merit. What do you do?

  49. 49.Your design reviews have become slow. Reviewers leave dozens of style comments, and big risks get missed. What do you change?

  50. 50.After a fair design review, the team decides against your preferred approach. You still disagree. What do you do?

  51. 51.A peer team's lead blocks your design, saying your feature's new endpoint duplicates one they own. What do you do first?

  52. 52.A teammate presents a design to the director, and you see a serious flaw in it during the meeting. How do you raise it?

  53. 53.You inherit a team mid-project as the new tech lead. The previous lead left a design you have doubts about. What do you do first?

  54. 54.You must choose a data store for a new feature before load numbers are known. What should you do?

  55. 55.Which decisions deserve the most time and input from others?

  56. 56.A new engineer questions why the app uses server-side sessions, a choice made eight months ago. Nobody remembers the reasons. What would have prevented this?

  57. 57.You recorded a decision to keep all features on one shared database. Which event should trigger revisiting it?

  58. 58.You chose a caching approach for product pages. Two weeks in, data shows it is serving stale prices. What do you do?

  59. 59.Your manager wants a yes or no on whether a feature can ship in six weeks. You are genuinely unsure. How do you answer?

  60. 60.Your startup's single relational database is at 70 percent CPU at peak, and traffic grows 10 percent a month. A teammate wants to move to a distributed database now. What do you do?

  61. 61.You lead a multi-quarter project to add shared team workspaces to a single-user app. How should you sequence the work?

  62. 62.Your project is on track, but mid-quarter the product manager adds three new requirements. What do you do?

  63. 63.A stakeholder asks your team for a custom reporting page that one customer requested. It would take a month. What do you do?

  64. 64.Halfway through a quarter, it is clear the full project will not fit. What should you cut first?

  65. 65.You are planning a two-quarter project. How should you estimate it?

  66. 66.Your team has five projects, all marked top priority. What do you do?

  67. 67.An engineer proposes a shared component library for your team's two web apps and wants to design every component up front. What do you suggest?

  68. 68.You want a quarter to fix a fragile background job system. How do you make the case to product leadership?

  69. 69.Your team spends about 20 percent of each sprint working around a poorly designed permissions module. How should you handle the debt?

  70. 70.Which kind of technical debt should a lead push hardest to fix?

  71. 71.For the fourth time, the product manager says the team will fix a known debt after the next launch. What do you do?

  72. 72.A teammate wants to pay down debt by upgrading every dependency in the repository in one pull request. What do you suggest?

  73. 73.A senior engineer on your team wants to rewrite a stable service in a new language to learn it. The service works and rarely changes. What do you say?

  74. 74.You lead a migration from a legacy API to a new versioned one. Six teams call the old API. How do you start?

  75. 75.A migration is 90 percent done, but two teams have not moved and say they are busy. The old system costs real money every month. What do you do?

  76. 76.During a migration, you add a compatibility layer so old clients keep working. What must you also do?

  77. 77.You are moving user sessions from one storage system to another in a live web app. What approach is safest?

  78. 78.Midway through a cross-team migration, you find the new system lacks a feature one team relies on. What do you do?

  79. 79.You want every team to adopt a shared error logging format, but you lead only your own team. How do you get others on board?

  80. 80.Your team keeps shipping accessibility bugs in forms, and you fix them yourself late in each sprint. What is the better approach?

  81. 81.Code reviews on your team take three days on average, and authors are frustrated. What do you change first?

  82. 82.A senior engineer leaves harsh code review comments. Two junior engineers have stopped asking for their review. What do you do?

  83. 83.Your team argues about code formatting in nearly every review. What is the best fix?

  84. 84.You want to raise quality on your team without slowing it down. Which signal should you watch?

  85. 85.Your team's on-call engineer for the feature you own gets paged nightly for alerts that nobody acts on. What do you do?

  86. 86.Every pull request on your team waits for your review, and you are falling behind on your own work. What do you do?

  87. 87.You delegated a feature to a mid-level engineer. Their approach differs from the one you would pick, but it will work. What do you do?

  88. 88.An engineer you mentor wants to grow toward senior. What is the most useful thing you can give them?

  89. 89.You are the only person who understands the payment integration, and you plan two weeks of leave next month. What do you do now?

  90. 90.An early-career teammate asks for help with a tricky frontend state bug. You could fix it in ten minutes. What do you do?

  91. 91.You notice you are in every meeting and every decision on your team waits for you. What is the first step to change that?

  92. 92.An engineer you delegated a project to is two weeks behind and has not told you. You hear it from the product manager. What do you do?

  93. 93.Your weekly technical sync has become a meeting engineers say is not useful. What do you do?

  94. 94.Your feature is due in four weeks. Today you realize it will likely be two weeks late. When should you tell stakeholders?

  95. 95.Your project is slipping. The product manager offers two engineers from another team. The work is tightly coupled and needs deep context. What do you say?

  96. 96.You told stakeholders a launch would slip one week. Now it is clear it will slip three. What do you do?

  97. 97.A project's status has been reported as green for six weeks, but engineers privately say it is behind. What do you change?

  98. 98.A deploy from your team breaks login for 15 minutes. You are the tech lead. During the incident, what is your main job?

  99. 99.In a postmortem, a manager asks who pushed the bad config. How do you respond as tech lead?

  100. 100.Your team's postmortems produce many action items, but few get done. What do you change?

  101. 101.After a second outage from the same cause in a month, leadership wants a full code freeze. You believe the cause is a missing check in the deploy pipeline. What do you do?

  102. 102.An incident was caused by a bug in another team's service, but your feature exposed it to customers. What do you do in the follow-up?

  103. 103.An engineer on your team was on call during a bad incident and feels responsible. What do you do as lead?

  104. 104.The designer wants an animated onboarding flow. Engineering estimates it adds three weeks. The product manager is torn. What do you do?

  105. 105.Your manager asks you to commit to a launch date you believe is unrealistic. What do you do?

  106. 106.A principal engineer insists your team adopt a new internal framework that is still unstable. You believe it will delay your launch. What do you do?

  107. 107.The platform team plans an API change that will break your frontend in two weeks. They did not consult you. What do you do first?

  108. 108.You need another team to add an index to their database for your feature. They have no time this quarter, and you have no authority over them. What do you do?

  109. 109.The support lead wants your team to fix a bug hurting a few large accounts. The marketing lead wants a landing page change. Both ask you directly to put theirs first. What do you do?

  110. 110.In a meeting about a caching design, you disagree with a respected senior engineer, and others are deferring to them. What do you do?