1. Explaining Trade-offs intermediate

    An architect must explain to a product leader why a requested feature will cost 150ms on the trading path. How should the trade-off be framed?

    2 min answer zerodhatradeoffscommunicationframing
  2. Explaining Trade-offs advanced

    An engineering blog post from a major company describes a dramatic architectural reversal. How should an architect read it, and what generalisations would be wrong?

    3 min answer prime-videoevidencegeneralisationjudgement
  3. Explaining Trade-offs intermediate

    An executive asks why the new system "feels slower" when your dashboards show average response time improved. How do you explain it?

    1 min answer communicationperformancepercentiles
  4. Explaining Trade-offs intermediate

    You must explain the same decision — moving from a monolith to services for one domain — to a CFO, an engineering manager and an engineer. What changes?

    2 min answer communicationinfluenceaudiences
  5. Facilitation intermediate

    A cross-team design session for a shared capability produces no decision after ninety minutes. What went wrong in the facilitation?

    2 min answer browserstackfacilitationdesign-sessiondecision
  6. Facilitation intermediate

    A design session with twelve participants produces no decisions and everyone leaves frustrated. What should the facilitator have done differently?

    2 min answer facilitationdecision-makingmeetingsstructure
  7. Facilitation advanced

    A nine-person cross-team session reaches a decision at minute 48 of a 50-minute slot and it is recorded the same afternoon. Two days later two attendees have separately told their own teams they disagreed, and by day four one team has stopped work on it. What failed, and which design of the session made it possible?

    3 min answer facilitationdecisionsdissentcommitment
  8. Facilitation advanced

    Two teams disagree strongly about where a service boundary should be. How do you run the session that resolves it?

    2 min answer facilitationdecisionsevidenceconflict
  9. Facilitation beginner

    Two teams meet for 60 minutes to agree who will own a shared notification capability. Everyone is prepared and the discussion is civil, and the meeting ends with "let us take this offline". Why does naming the decision-maker before the session change the outcome mechanically rather than politically?

    2 min answer facilitationdecision-rightsconsensusmeetings
  10. Handling Disagreement advanced

    A senior engineer strongly opposes your architectural decision. You have decided anyway. How do you handle it?

    2 min answer leadershipcommunicationteams
  11. Handling Disagreement advanced

    A senior stakeholder insists on an approach you believe is wrong. How should this be handled so the organisation reaches a good outcome regardless of who is right?

    2 min answer disagreementinfluencedecisionrisk
  12. Handling Disagreement advanced

    On 1 August 2012 Knight Capital's trading system sent millions of erroneous orders and lost about $440M in 45 minutes. Automated warnings had been emailed before the market opened and were not treated as critical. What is the communication failure here, and what mechanism fixes it?

    2 min answer knight capitalescalationalertingstop authority