Question: Cost vs. Performance
Explore how to apply the STRIDE framework to evaluate trade-offs between server cost and performance. Understand how to quantify impacts on user value, business goals, and resource constraints. Learn to recommend phased, strategic solutions that align with your product's competitive differentiation and metrics such as latency, cost per user, and conversion rates.
Interview question
Your product is running expensive server operations. How do you decide whether to reduce costs or invest more to maintain speed?
By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to evaluate a cost-versus-performance decision using a structured, strategic lens. You’ll learn how to:
Quantify the trade-off between speed and cost.
Use STRIDE to structure your reasoning.
Define the right metrics for performance, cost, and user value.
Recommend a defensible decision aligned with business goals.
This question tests whether you can think like a mini-GM, not just an executor of features.
Scenario overview
Your interviewer asks:
Server costs are climbing. We can cut costs by slowing certain operations, or we can invest more to maintain high performance. What should we do?
They want to see whether you can:
Avoid reacting emotionally to increasing costs.
Frame the decision around business impact, not engineering preference.
Evaluate both sides with rigor. ...