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IntermediateBEHAVIORAL
Explain a situation where you had to advocate for addressing technical debt that conflicted with short-term feature delivery goals. How did you present the trade-offs, get stakeholder buy-in, and measure success after remediation?
Software Engineer
General

Sample Answer

On a consumer app team we had a fragile monolith causing 30% slower feature rollout and two high-severity incidents in a quarter. Product wanted three new features for an upcoming campaign, but I estimated an added two-week delay per feature without cleanup. I presented options with numbers: ship features now with a 25% higher incident risk and slower velocity, or invest three sprints to refactor the common module and cut future feature time by 40%. I proposed a compromise: one sprint of automated tests and API contracts plus a boutique refactor for the highest-risk module. Leadership approved when I showed projected saved engineering hours (approx. 320 over 6 months). Six months later deploy frequency rose 2.5x and incidents dropped 70%.

Keywords

Quantify impact of technical debt (velocity loss, incidents)Present clear options with trade-offs and projected savingsCompromise: short-term mitigation + targeted refactorMeasure success with deploy frequency and incident reduction
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