IntermediateLEADERSHIP
As a senior full-stack engineer leading a small team, how would you set the technical strategy and execution plan for migrating a monolith to microservices while minimizing user impact and keeping stakeholders informed?
full stack
General

Sample Answer

When I led a four-person team to break up a customer-management monolith used by ~500k users, I started by defining measurable goals: reduce deploy blast radius to under 0.1% downtime, cut release time from 4 hours to 20 minutes, and move 60% of traffic to services within six months. We mapped domain boundaries, prioritized low-risk, high-value slices, and created backward-compatible API contracts. For execution we used feature flags, canary releases, schema versioning, and automated migrations in CI/CD so each service could be rolled back quickly. I held weekly 30-minute demos for PMs and ops, sent a concise status email with risks and mitigation, and ran a post-mortem after each cutover. That approach kept stakeholders comfortable and reduced incident rate by ~70% during the project.

Keywords

Set measurable goals (downtime, deploy time, percentage migrated, timeline)Use domain-driven cuts, backward-compatible APIs, schema versioningMinimize risk with feature flags, canaries, automated CI/CD migrationsRegular stakeholder comms: short demos, concise risk-focused updates