Programmes and delivery¶

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Planning and running cross-team work: dependencies, launches, risk and communication.

On this page: Both tracks (4) · AI Leadership (9)

Both tracks¶

How would you roll out updates to Alexa devices already deployed in people's homes?
- System design · Senior · Asked at: Amazon † · ✍ Answer · Suggest a fix
- Tests: Whether you account for fleet diversity, interrupted updates and safe rollout.
- A strong answer covers:
  - Clarify update scope, compatibility, connectivity and user disruption.
  - Use controlled cohorts, health checks and recoverable installation.
  - Define rollout pauses, rollback ownership and support communication.
- Read: Site Reliability Engineering (Google)
Walk through a project you owned from beginning to end and its key technical decisions.
- Self-presentation · Senior · Asked at: Anthropic † · Suggest a fix
- Tests: Whether technical choices are connected to constraints, sequencing and outcomes.
- A strong answer covers:
  - Pick a project you owned end to end, and show how its constraints set the order of work.
  - Walk through two or three key decisions, each with the alternative you rejected and the reason.
  - Close by tying each decision to the measured outcome, including one whose cost showed up later.
- Read: Design Docs at Google (Industrial Empathy)
Tell me about a technical misjudgement that delayed a project.
- Behavioral · Senior · Asked at: Anthropic † · ✍ Answer · Suggest a fix
- Tests: Whether you recognise faulty assumptions and change planning practice afterward.
- A strong answer covers:
  - Pick a misjudgement that was technical and yours, stated as the assumption you believed then.
  - Show when contrary evidence first appeared, how long you took to act, and what the delay cost.
  - Name the planning practice you changed, such as testing risky assumptions first, and where it later helped.
- Read: Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure (Google) · Design Docs at Google (Industrial Empathy)
You have four hours to build and demonstrate an AI-powered product. How do you allocate the time?
- Applied scenario · Senior · Suggest a fix
- Tests: Whether you scope a credible demonstration and protect time for integration.
- A strong answer covers:
  - Spend the opening minutes fixing one user, one task and the exact demo path before building anything.
  - Use hosted models and existing parts, and get a thin end-to-end path working early before deepening it.
  - Freeze features well before the end, rehearse on prepared inputs, and state plainly what is stubbed.
- Read: How the alpha phase works (Government Digital Service)

AI Leadership¶

Walk through the most difficult product launch you led.
- Behavioral · Senior · Asked at: OpenAI † · ✍ Answer · Suggest a fix
- Tests: Whether you can explain dependencies, decisions and your contribution to the result.
- A strong answer covers:
  - Set out the goal, constraints, stakeholders and critical dependencies.
  - Explain a consequential decision, alternatives and how you kept people aligned.
  - State the realised outcome and what you changed for later launches.
- Read: Site Reliability Engineering (Google) · Design Docs at Google (Industrial Empathy)
Three weeks before launching an LLM feature, evaluation reveals substantial hallucinations on edge cases. What happens next?
- Applied scenario · Senior · Asked at: Amazon † · ✍ Answer · Suggest a fix
- Tests: Whether you make a risk-based launch decision rather than protecting the date at any cost.
- A strong answer covers:
  - Check severity, prevalence, affected users and the reliability of the evaluation.
  - Compare narrowing scope, adding review, fixing causes and delaying release.
  - Assign a decision owner, explicit exit criteria and a communication plan.
- Read: AI Risk Management Framework (NIST) · Demystifying evals for AI agents (Anthropic)
Describe a large cross-functional project, including ambiguity, roadblocks and delays.
- Behavioral · Senior · Asked at: Meta 🗣 · ✍ Answer · Suggest a fix
- Tests: Whether your delivery method adapts to changing information and dependencies.
- A strong answer covers:
  - Map deliverables and dependencies to accountable owners.
  - Explain how you detected a blockage and changed the plan or escalation path.
  - Distinguish actual delivery and impact from initial targets.
- Read: Design Docs at Google (Industrial Empathy) · Site Reliability Engineering (Google)
Present a major initiative you led: what worked, what did not, and what you learned.
- Self-presentation · Senior · Asked at: Anthropic 🗣 · ✍ Answer · Suggest a fix
- Tests: Whether you can assess an initiative honestly across planning and execution.
- A strong answer covers:
  - Pick an initiative you owned end to end and state its original goal in measurable terms.
  - Separate planning errors from execution errors, and name one decision of yours you would now reverse.
  - Close with the result against the original goal and a practice you changed afterwards.
- Read: Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure (Google)
Describe an AI product you built from scratch and how you took it through delivery.
- Self-presentation · Senior · Asked at: Microsoft † · Suggest a fix
- Tests: Whether you can explain a complete delivery path rather than only a prototype.
- A strong answer covers:
  - Pick a product that reached real users, and open with the problem and why AI fitted it.
  - Spend most of the answer on the prototype-to-production gap: evaluation set, quality bar, failure handling, launch decision.
  - Close with adoption and outcome after launch, and how quality was monitored and improved once real traffic arrived.
- Read: Your AI Product Needs Evals (Hamel Husain)
An upstream data team will miss a milestone on your AI programme. How do you revise the plan and communicate the impact?
- Applied scenario · Senior · 🧪 generated from job-posting themes · ✍ Answer · Suggest a fix
- Tests: Whether you quantify dependency impact and present actionable alternatives.
- A strong answer covers:
  - Establish exactly what slipped: which data, by how much, and how reliable the new date is.
  - Trace the slip through the critical path and price re-sequencing, partial data, descoping and moving the date.
  - Bring sponsors priced options with a decision owner, and add intermediate checkpoints with the upstream team.
- Read: Dependency Mapping (Atlassian Team Playbook)
How would you plan an AI programme whose central research hypothesis may fail?
- Applied scenario · Senior · 🧪 generated from job-posting themes · ✍ Answer · Suggest a fix
- Tests: Whether milestones retire uncertainty and support explicit stop decisions.
- A strong answer covers:
  - Name the hypothesis and the cheapest experiment that could falsify it.
  - Make each milestone retire a specific unknown, with a decision rule agreed in advance.
  - Fund a fallback and agree the stop condition before anyone is invested.
- Read: Design Docs at Google (Industrial Empathy)
Engineering, operations and risk teams disagree about launch readiness. How would you reach a traceable decision?
- Applied scenario · Senior · 🧪 generated from job-posting themes · ✍ Answer · Suggest a fix
- Tests: Whether you clarify criteria and decision authority instead of counting approvals.
- A strong answer covers:
  - Convert each objection into a named, testable criterion with evidence attached.
  - State who decides, who must be consulted and who holds a veto, before the room meets.
  - Record the decision, the accepted residual risk, its owner and a review date.
- Read: AI Risk Management Framework (NIST)
During an AI rollout, a provider changes model behaviour and harmful actions reach customers. The previous model cannot be restored immediately. As the programme lead, how do you coordinate containment, customer response and a defensible restart?
- Applied scenario · 🧪 generated from job-posting themes · ✍ Answer · Suggest a fix
- Tests: Whether you coordinate an incident when rollback is unavailable, preserve decision authority and separate containment from demonstrated recovery.
- A strong answer covers:
  - Establish incident command, stop or constrain harmful actions, preserve evidence and identify affected customers.
  - Coordinate operational and customer owners, provider escalation and update cadence; use a safe degraded workflow if available.
  - Require representative quality and safety evidence, explicit restart authority and staged monitoring before restoring autonomy.
- Read: Site Reliability Engineering (Google) · Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure (Google) · AI Risk Management Framework (NIST)

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