Process Design: Designing and Scaling a Process

Question

Your team owns an API (or framework) that many teams across the company make changes to. Design a process to ensure that all changes are reviewed by a member of your team.

Background

Designing good processes is another core TPM attribute. The purpose of this question is to probe the strong process design skills you’ll need as a TPM, and apply it to a technical domain to see if you are comfortable with combining technical skills with rigorous program management skills to manage change.

Similar to a previous question, we’ll use a role playing approach to simulate a real live interview.

Solution approach

We will use the following structured approach for this question:

• Clarify assumptions given its ambiguous nature.
• Outline the process workflow and the goals we want to accomplish at each step.
• Propose a process solution that will meet the stated goals.

Sample answer

Interviewee: I would like to start by clarifying some aspects of the question. First, how frequently should we expect changes to the API?

Interviewer: Let’s assume changes are quite frequent and tend to spike during certain time periods. There are at least several changes every week.

Interviewee: What’s the impact of changes? Why do we want to review every change?

Interviewer: This API is external facing, and many external clients depend on this API. We want to make sure the changes do not impact availability or introduce inconsistency in the API functions.

Interviewee: Are the changes fairly similar in nature or is each change unique?

Interviewer: Changes usually fall along similar themes such as introducing a ...