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Process Design: Rollout a Risky Change

Process Design: Rollout a Risky Change

An example interview on rolling out a risky change.

We'll cover the following...

Question

You need to rollout a risky change, such as a system-wide configuration change or new binary deployment. How would you do that?

Background

Managing change in an ambiguous environment is a core part of the TPM skillset, whether it is a process, system, or feature change. This question is designed to exercise this skill and provide a framework to help you do so.

Similar to a previous question, we’ll use a role playing approach to simulate a real live interview.

Solution approach

We will use the following structured approach for this question:

  • Clarify the scope of the change.
  • Outline the potential risks.
  • Propose mitigations for these risks.

Sample answer

Interviewee: First, I’d like to understand the scale and scope of the change to understand the potential impact. These are some questions I have:

  • How will the change be deployed? How fast will the change be felt?
  • How many machines will be impacted?
  • What are the potential negative effects of this change? How many users would be impacted?
  • How fast can we rollback if something goes wrong?
  • Do we have access to a test environment to validate
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