Walk me through a design doc you wrote that other teams had to review and sign off on.
answer
- one sentence on the decision at stake
- criteria named before options
- non-goals and rollback, in writing
- the two objections you absorbed
- sign-off, decider, and what shipped
basics
~20 sProbes written technical judgement and how you handle review from people you do not manage. Walk the document as a decision — options, criteria, non-goals, rollback — then name the objections it absorbed and how sign-off actually happened.
how to answer
6 beats- what the document had to decide, and for whomOpen with the decision in one sentence and name the teams whose sign-off you needed. Resist starting with the system diagram — the interviewer can only judge the design once they know what was contested.
- the criteria and the options you scored against themSay what you compared on before you say which option won, and include the one you rejected. If you agreed the criteria with reviewers up front, say so explicitly; that is the detail most candidates leave out.
- the sections you added because you expected objectionsNon-goals, cost, rollback, migration burden per team. Explain which objection each section was written to pre-empt. This beat and the previous one should carry most of your airtime.
- how you ran the review and closed the commentsDescribe the mechanics: how long comments were open, what you answered in writing versus in a meeting, and how you unblocked silent reviewers. Name the two comments that actually changed the design.
- sign-off and what shippedSay who signed, when, and what the outcome was in numbers once it was running. If the design was amended after contact with reality, say so — that is a strength, not a confession.
- what you would write differently nowClose with one specific structural change to how you write these — an earlier criteria step, an explicit owner per section, fewer options. Keep it to a sentence or two.
your answer
4 story prompts- Pick a document you actually wrote that other people commented on, and open it before drafting.
- List the options you rejected and the single line that killed each one.
- Find two review comments that changed the design, and note who raised them.
- Reuse your cross-team decision story here if this document was its artifact.
draft and rehearse your own answer in a learn session
go deeper
This probes technical judgement expressed in writing and your ability to earn agreement from reviewers you have no authority over. The interviewer is looking for whether the document framed a decision or merely described a design, whether alternatives were treated seriously, and whether review genuinely changed the outcome. A strong answer proves you can get a contested choice signed off without escalating it.
This came out of an edge certificate expiring mid-morning, which left our onboarding API refusing connections for eighteen minutes. Infra was three of us at the time. Automation was the obvious fix; the contested part was who owns a certificate for the rest of its life, and that needed four teams to agree, so I wrote it up. The document opened with the decision in a single sentence and a non-goals section, because an earlier thread had drifted into choosing an issuing authority and died there. Then the criteria, which I agreed with the two loudest reviewers before I filled in any scores: warning before expiry, who gets paged, migration hours per service, and monthly spend. Three options underneath, each scored on those four, plus a rollback plan for the one I recommended. Thirty-one comments came back and two of them were real. The mobile team could not adopt short-lived certificates on their release cadence, and finance wanted the spend bounded. I added a staged rollout that left the mobile edge on the old path for a quarter, and a spend cap with a named owner. The rest I answered in the document rather than in a meeting, then ran a forty-minute review with our engineering director deciding, and closed it the same day. Median warning on customer-facing certificates went from five days to twenty-eight, and renewal now pages at twelve days instead of at expiry. What I would change is the criteria step — I set those with two reviewers and had to relitigate them once with a third team who had never seen them.
The load-bearing move is agreeing criteria with reviewers before scoring options, and converting the two genuine objections into document changes rather than rebuttals. The self-critique about relitigated criteria adds credibility. Without a named decider and a date, this would read as a document that drifted to approval.
The document I am proudest of did not describe a system at all. We had five expiry incidents in one quarter across nine teams, and each was fixed locally in a way that did not travel, so I wrote a standard instead of a design. It did three things. It defined the unit: every certificate has one named owning team and one automated renewal path. It set a floor of forty-five days of warning before expiry, and said what a decision record for infra choices has to contain, because half our arguments were re-runs of settled ones. And it named who arbitrates when two teams both claim or both disown a certificate. I deliberately did not write the implementation. I wrote the criteria, then asked the three teams with the worst exposure to bring their own migration plans measured against them. That is also how I got sign-off — they were authors rather than reviewers, so there was nothing left to object to by the time it went out. The objection I could not design away was staffing, so I traded: my group absorbed the first migration for any team that adopted within a quarter. Across a hundred and eighteen certificates the median warning moved from nine days to forty-five, and we went from five expiry incidents in a quarter to none in the two quarters after. The part that mattered most is that the decision-record template is still what those teams use for arguments that have nothing to do with certificates.
The signal here is authoring the criteria and the mechanism while delegating the design, plus turning affected teams into co-authors so sign-off is structural rather than negotiated. Naming the staffing trade you could not design away keeps it honest. Describing the implementation instead of the standard would downlevel it.
A short design note for your own change is a perfectly good answer at this level. Show that you wrote down an alternative you rejected and why, and that you asked a specific person for review rather than posting a link and hoping.
Expect a feature-sized document reviewed by your team plus one neighbour. The bar is a real trade-off section and evidence that review changed something — quote a comment that moved the design and say what you did with it.
Cross-team sign-off is the scope here. Show that you set the criteria with reviewers before scoring options, wrote non-goals to keep scope from drifting, and converted the two hardest objections into concrete changes rather than paragraphs of rebuttal.
The interesting document at this level defines how decisions get made, not just this one. Talk about the standard, the template or the criteria you set, why you let other people author the implementation, and what adoption you got from teams that do not report to you.
saying these in an interview costs you the question
- Reciting the architecture instead of the decision the document settled
- No alternatives section — only the design you already wanted
- Cannot name one comment that changed the document
- Describing sign-off as a formality nobody actually read
- No cost, risk or rollback considered anywhere in the doc
- Blaming reviewers for slow feedback with no attempt to unblock them
- Which review comment changed your mind?Have one ready, with the change it caused. Interviewers use this to detect documents written to be approved rather than to be decided. Naming the reviewer's role and the specific edit — a new option, a staged rollout, a cost cap — is worth more than a general claim that you welcome feedback.
- How did you handle a reviewer who never responded?Describe your escalation ladder in order: a direct ask with a deadline, a short synchronous walkthrough, then proceeding with silence recorded as consent and the person notified. Show you did not let one unresponsive reviewer stall the decision indefinitely, and that you did not pretend they had agreed.
- What did the document get wrong?Pick a real miss and say how you found out — an assumption that did not hold, a cost you underestimated, a team you forgot to include. Then say what you now write differently. A document you still describe as fully correct suggests you never checked it against what shipped.