IT services and consulting, senior. 31 questions across 7 blocks, about 16 hr of work.
Breadth beats depth here, because a consultant is staffed against whatever the account needs next quarter and the panel is measuring how quickly you become useful on an unfamiliar codebase. The rounds that decide the outcome are usually the case study and the client-facing conversation: estimation, scoping, what you do when the requirement is ambiguous, and how you say no to a client without losing the account. Presales and solutioning questions appear even for delivery roles at senior levels, since anyone leading a workstream eventually writes part of a proposal.
Front-load breadth, put the two hardest rounds mid-week when you still have time to react to a bad session, and keep the last evening for a timed loop and your stories. Two hours a night done every night beats one eight-hour Saturday, because retrieval improves with spacing and a single long session mostly produces the feeling of having worked.
Read the sheets for the core sections of this track at speed. Mark the items you could not answer; they become your revision list all week.
Set an agenda, ask about the business outcome and current process before any technology, and use the call to qualify rather than to collect requirements: establish who decides, what changed to make this the quarter they act, and what would have to be proven, then confirm it in a written recap.
Model the process as performed rather than as documented, in swimlanes so handoffs are visible, then quantify cycle time and rework rate before proposing anything; without baseline numbers a to-be design is just the current mess with software on top.
Build what your users pay you for and buy the rest, correcting that heuristic for switching cost and data gravity. The comparison people get wrong is licence fee versus zero, when it is really licence fee versus salaries, on-call and opportunity cost for as long as the system lives.
The stack and concept questions this loop opens with. Answer before reading, and note which probes you missed rather than whether you got it right.
DORA now publishes five measures, three of throughput and two of instability, and they work because improving one dishonestly tends to show up in another. Report them as trends for a delivery system rather than as a per-team league table, and never let them into individual performance conversations.
Model the state changes and invariants rather than the nouns the business names, and go looking for reversal, amendment, partial completion and manual override before committing to a shape. Domain-driven design earns its keep where rules are contested; on CRUD and reporting it is ceremony.
The analysis does not shrink, it changes container: elicitation, rule-finding and precision now land in refined backlog items and acceptance criteria at the point of build. What a specification gave you free — traceability, cross-cutting requirements, a scope baseline — you rebuild on purpose.
Removing humans from production moves the privilege into the pipeline, so the boundary becomes who can change what it runs and which identity it assumes. Duties are separated by branch protection, environment approvals and deploying by digest, and it fails when one change alters both code and workflow.
Read the throughput curve first: if throughput has flattened while latency rises, you are queueing behind a saturated resource, and the job is to find which one by walking utilisation and saturation from the load generator through the app tier to the database.
Whiteboard each one for real, on paper, before you look. A design answer you have only read is one you cannot produce under questioning.
Architect a fault-tolerant Demos & POCs solution supporting rolling updates, automated failovers, and graceful degradation during network splits.
Architect a fault-tolerant The BA in Agile solution supporting rolling updates, automated failovers, and graceful degradation during network splits.
Architect a fault-tolerant Metrics & Flow solution supporting rolling updates, automated failovers, and graceful degradation during network splits.
Architect a fault-tolerant Introduction & Career Narrative solution supporting rolling updates, automated failovers, and graceful degradation during network splits.
The rounds where there is no correct answer, only a defensible one. State your assumptions out loud; that is what is being scored.
Scope a POC around the two or three technical claims genuinely in doubt, with written pass/fail exit criteria signed off by the person who will decide, a hard time box, and named customer resources committed before any work starts.
Architect a fault-tolerant Analysis & UAT solution supporting rolling updates, automated failovers, and graceful degradation during network splits.
Architect a fault-tolerant Backlog & Estimation solution supporting rolling updates, automated failovers, and graceful degradation during network splits.
Architect a fault-tolerant Conflict & Collaboration solution supporting rolling updates, automated failovers, and graceful degradation during network splits.
Architect a fault-tolerant Architecture Scenarios solution supporting rolling updates, automated failovers, and graceful degradation during network splits.
Return to whatever went worst this week. One session on a genuine weakness is worth three on material you already have.
A POC removes a technical objection; it does not create a buyer or a business case. Deals lost after a passing POC are usually lost on the commercial track that stood still while the technical one ran, or on criteria measuring what you are good at rather than what the buyer had to decide.
Plan UAT backwards from the business outcome rather than forwards from the specification, and have real users run real work on realistic data. If sign-off lands on the wrong thing, measure the gap against the original objective and raise it as a change with its own business case.
Architect a fault-tolerant Facilitation & Ceremonies solution supporting rolling updates, automated failovers, and graceful degradation during network splits.
Architect a fault-tolerant Failure & Learning solution supporting rolling updates, automated failovers, and graceful degradation during network splits.
Run the rounds back to back with a timer and no notes. The point is stamina and switching cost, which no amount of single-question practice reveals.
Architect a fault-tolerant Discovery & Qualification solution supporting rolling updates, automated failovers, and graceful degradation during network splits.
Usually both are correct and they are answering different questions, so stop comparing totals and reconcile down to the first point of divergence. Publish a bridge that explains the gap in named components, then have one definition made authoritative with a named owner instead of declaring a winner.
Architect a fault-tolerant Impediments & Conflict solution supporting rolling updates, automated failovers, and graceful degradation during network splits.
Architect a fault-tolerant Leadership & Influence solution supporting rolling updates, automated failovers, and graceful degradation during network splits.
Spend the first week building an evidence map from money, traffic, incidents and deploys rather than from code, and interviewing the people who touch it with one fixed set of questions. Spend the second producing a risk-ordered plan of stabilisation before structure, with unknowns listed explicitly.
Architect a fault-tolerant Acquiring Domain Knowledge solution supporting rolling updates, automated failovers, and graceful degradation during network splits.
Write your stories in full, prepare the questions you will ask them, and stop early.
Say clearly that it is not available today, find out what outcome sits behind the request, and offer the nearest credible path — never imply a roadmap commitment you cannot get in writing, because that is the objection that loses deals at renewal rather than at signature.
Find the decision the dashboard is meant to support and the event that triggered the request, define every metric word precisely, check the data exists before promising the picture, and take back a one-page note that fixes scope against the date instead of accepting the date against unknown scope.
Change what the meeting is about rather than how it is run: inspect the board against the Sprint Goal instead of polling individuals, stop being the person addressed, and push detail into a follow-on conversation. If the Sprint has no real goal, no format will save the event.
Name the clock and what it was costing, say which facts you had and which you chose not to wait for, classify the call as reversible or not, act at the level you were authorised to and say so, and record the reasoning at the time so it can be judged on what you knew.
Scope is the union of the track's sections, the rounds this employer type asks regardless of role, and the industry if you named one. Weights above 1.0 pull a section up the order; below 1.0 push it down. Nothing is excluded - a deprioritised section still appears when its best question is the most relevant thing left.