You’re asked to create a six-month backend platform roadmap to support a strategic shift (e.g., multi-region deployment or new compliance requirement). How would you prioritize initiatives, allocate team effort, and align with cross-functional stakeholders?

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VirtualInterview.AI · Accepted Answer

I’d start by clarifying the business goal in concrete terms: for example, “support multi-region with \u003c200ms p95 latency for 95% of users and RPO/RTO of 5/15 minutes.” Then I map the gap from current to target across four streams: infra (regions, VPC, networking), data (replication, consistency model), app/services (feature flags, routing, config), and governance (compliance, observability, runbooks).

From there, I build a 6‑month roadmap in 2–3 iterations. Phase 1 is enabling foundations and de‑risking: spike multi-region in a shadow environment, define data strategy, and build automated compliance checks. Phase 2 is progressive rollout by domain, starting with low-risk services and moving to critical paths. I usually protect about 30–40% of capacity for this program across 2–3 squads, leaving room for product work.

To align stakeholders, I define clear milestones, SLAs, and blast-radius limits, then run a monthly steering review with product, security, SRE, and ops to adjust scope based on actual metrics and incident learnings.

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