How would you A/B test a redesigned dashboard?
This tests your ability to translate a product goal into a technical plan. A good answer defines "engagement" with metrics, outlines the bucketing and instrumentation strategy, and discusses statistical significance.
What information do you need in a user story?
This tests your ability to connect engineering work to user value. A great answer covers the user persona (who), their motivation (why), and measurable success criteria (what), explaining how this context informs technical decisions.
How would you refactor an inverted test pyramid?
This tests your ability to create a pragmatic, multi-sprint strategy for tech debt. A good answer includes analyzing the suite, quarantining flaky tests, enforcing new coverage standards, and incrementally refactoring. A red flag is proposing a total rewrite.
Trunk-Based Development vs. GitFlow for High-Frequency Releases
This tests your grasp of modern CI/CD trade-offs. A great answer explains how TBD's frequent merges to main, decoupled from release by feature flags, enable velocity. Then, contrast this with GitFlow's complexity.
The Strangler Fig Pattern for Legacy System Refactoring
Tests your understanding of gradual legacy modernization and risk management. A great answer defines the pattern (new system grows over old), outlines the process (identify seams, build new, redirect traffic), and contrasts it with risky "big bang" rewrites.
Describe the stages of a CI/CD pipeline for a containerized app
This tests your practical knowledge of automated software delivery and risk management. A strong answer outlines CI, build, test, and deploy stages, including container-specific steps like image scanning and quality gates like automated testing and…
Explain the Test Pyramid and its strategic use
Tests your grasp of balanced testing trade-offs. A good answer defines the Unit, Service, and UI layers, explains the cost/speed rationale, and applies it to a feature strategy. A red flag is describing the pyramid but not its strategic 'why'.
How do you fix a team that consistently overcommits?
This tests diagnosing systemic process failures. A great answer investigates root causes like stakeholder pressure, then proposes using historical velocity, tracking actual capacity, and improving backlog refinement.
How do you break down an epic into user stories?
Tests translating business needs into incremental work. A great answer uses story mapping to define a vertical slice MVP, then creates sprint-ready stories with acceptance criteria. A red flag is just listing features without prioritizing user value.
How does a team handle strong technical disagreements?
This tests your ability to facilitate productive conflict. A great answer frames disagreement as healthy, then outlines structured techniques like timeboxing dialogue or multi-voting with reasoning.
How do you resolve team optimizations causing org-level friction?
Tests your ability to see beyond your team and facilitate org-level change. Gather data on the friction, facilitate cross-team discussions to align on shared goals, and propose structural solutions. A red flag is blaming others or only protecting your team.
How would you implement an Andon Cord for a software team?
Tests your understanding of CI, team ownership, and balancing speed with quality. Define a trigger (broken main build), an action (halt merges/deploys), and a team response (swarming to fix). Red flag: scheduling the fix or blaming an individual.
How would you identify and elevate your team's primary constraint?
This tests systems thinking over local optimization. A great answer outlines the 5 steps: identify the constraint (e.g., long queues), exploit it, subordinate other processes, elevate it, and repeat. A red flag is jumping straight to hiring or buying tools.
Feature Teams: Ship Value, Not Layers
A feature team owns a customer-facing feature from start to finish, unlike component teams that own a single tech layer. This reduces handoffs and speeds up delivery.
Work Item Age: Don't Let Your Tasks Spoil
Think of work item age as the time elapsed since a task started, like food in a fridge with an expiration date. Kanban teams use it to spot delays and bottlenecks. The biggest mistake is tracking age without acting on aging items to unblock them.
Kanban Replenishment: Pulling Work, Not Pushing It
Instead of a manager pushing tasks, a replenishment meeting is where the team pulls work into their active backlog. This cadence refills the 'Ready to Start' column, ensuring a steady flow of well-understood tasks.
Kaizen: The Art of Continuous Improvement
Kaizen means "continuous improvement," making small, frequent changes instead of big, risky ones. In Scrum, this is the heart of the Sprint Retrospective, where teams inspect their process and define concrete actions for the next sprint.
Cycle Time Scatterplot: Visualize Your Team's Predictability
A Cycle Time Scatterplot visualizes delivery speed by plotting how long each task took against its completion date. Agile teams use it to spot predictability trends and set realistic delivery forecasts.
Cycle Time: Measuring Your 'Time to Value'
Cycle time is the total duration from a feature's conception to its deployment in production. Agile teams track it to speed up feedback loops and value delivery. The main footgun: start and stop times are inconsistent, making cross-team comparisons unreliable.
Service Delivery Review: The Missing Agile Feedback Loop
A Service Delivery Review shifts focus from *what* was built to *how* it was delivered. It's a regular meeting where teams and customers review quantitative metrics like lead time and blockers.