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