Technical Risk Management interview questions

Identifying architectural bottlenecks and resource constraints.

3 questions in Technical Program Management.

Technical Program ManagementA 18-minute read on how the topic fits together, before the questions.Technical program management fundamentals60 short answers on one page, for revising rather than studying.

hard3

hardScenarioBehavioural

In standups you keep hearing engineers refer to a scaling limit as a known thing, but it has never appeared on any risk register or in any status report. What do you do with that?

Widely known and never escalated usually means the risk has no owner and no threshold, not that it is being hidden. Get it written down with a trigger and an owner, and find out why the existing escalation path did not carry it.

5 minsenior, staff, lead

hardScenarioBehavioural

One engineer is the only person who understands the payments integration, and four of your workstreams queue behind them. How do you manage that as a program risk?

Treat it as a throughput constraint first and a knowledge risk second: measure the queue, take work off the expert that only needed their review, and buy down the single point of failure with paired delivery on real tasks rather than with documentation.

5 minmid, senior, staff, lead

hardScenarioCase Study

You need a steering committee to fund a quarter of platform hardening instead of two customer features. How do you put technical risk and feature risk side by side so an executive can choose?

Express both in the same currency, which is expected cost to the business over a stated horizon, and show the arithmetic from assumptions the room can argue with. Give the committee a real choice with a decision date rather than a single option and a plea.

5 minsenior, staff, lead