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Technicalstretch
Your checkout went down for an hour. What do you do during the outage and after it?
How to approach it
Split your answer into two phases: stabilize and communicate during the outage, then learn and prevent after it.
How a strong answer opens
“I'd split it into two phases. During the outage, help engineers restore service and keep customers and leadership informed. Afterward, run a blameless review so it can't happen the same way again.”
Outline of a strong answer
Try answering out loud for a few minutes before you open this.
- During: confirm impact and join the incident channel
- Support engineers; avoid adding noise
- Communicate with customers, support and leadership
- After: run a blameless review of the root cause
- Agree on fixes and monitoring
- Measure lost revenue and follow up with affected customers
Where this question usually goes wrong
Jumping into debugging yourself and adding noise during the incident, or skipping follow-up with affected customers afterward.
Learn the method
Working with engineers in Module 6, Technical for PMs.
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