1. Business KPIs advanced

    Instacart's 2023 S-1 reported 2022 revenue of $2,551M, split $1,811M transaction and $740M advertising and other. You are the architect for the ad-serving path inside the shopping app. The interviewer asks which business KPI your next six months of work moves, and how you would prove it moved. Talk me through your answer.

    3 min answer instacartkpisattributionadvertising
  2. Business Processes advanced Multiple choice

    A travel platform's booking process spans six systems and takes days to change. Where should the process logic live, and what is the trade-off?

    2 min answer business-processorchestrationworkflowcoupling
  3. Capability Mapping advanced Multiple choice

    A capability map published nine months ago is quoted in every strategy deck. Each level-3 capability lists between four and eleven supporting systems and no system supports only one capability. The last two quarters of funding decisions contradict the map's own priorities. The two capabilities the strategy calls differentiating are both rated mature. What is the diagnosis?

    3 min answer capability mappingdiagnosisinvestmentartefacts
  4. Capability Mapping advanced

    Salesforce's 2009 SIGMOD paper describes serving many tenants from shared tables with a metadata layer, rather than giving each customer their own schema. Which business-model decision forced that, and what did it cost them?

    3 min answer salesforcemulti-tenancymetadatabusiness model
  5. Domain Boundaries advanced

    A B2B commerce and financing business is deciding where to draw the boundary between its commerce and credit domains. What should determine it?

    2 min answer ofbusinessdomainsboundariescredit
  6. Domain Boundaries advanced

    A marketplace is deciding whether "listing" and "inventory" are one domain or two. How should the boundary be decided, and what evidence settles it?

    2 min answer domain-boundariesbounded-contextlanguageownership
  7. Domain Boundaries advanced

    The word "customer" means different things in sales, fulfilment and finance. How does that affect your service design?

    2 min answer dddbounded-contextcanonical-modelubiquitous-language
  8. Domain Boundaries advanced

    Twilio announced the acquisition of Segment in October 2020 for about $3.2 billion in stock and closed it in November 2020, adding a customer-data platform alongside its messaging and voice APIs. Buying a product in an adjacent domain buys that domain's boundary along with its code. What does the acquirer gain, what does it pay, and when does that bill arrive?

    3 min answer twiliosegmentacquisitionbounded-context
  9. Domain Boundaries advanced

    Walk me through how you would choose the first capability to extract from a fifteen-year-old monolith, given that leadership expects visible progress within two quarters.

    3 min answer monolithextractionboundariessequencing
  10. Operating Models advanced

    A 900-person engineering organisation funds work as 9-month projects. A project receives a budget and a team drawn from a resourcing pool; both dissolve at go-live. Run costs land on a central operations group of 30 people who support about 140 services. The CTO wants durable product teams that own their services in production. Sequence this change over four quarters without stopping delivery.

    3 min answer operating-modelfunding-modelownershipyou-build-it-you-run-it
  11. Operating Models advanced

    A logistics marketplace expanding city by city must decide what is centralised and what is local. How should that be structured?

    2 min answer porterexpansioncentralisationconfiguration
  12. Operating Models advanced

    A super-app spans messaging, payments, mini-programs and social features. What operating model supports it, and what does the architecture require in return?

    2 min answer operating-modelautonomyplatformgovernance