You inherit a red program. The tech lead and the sponsor both tell you privately the other team is the real blocker. In the steering committee, they stay silent and nod at your recovery plan. What is the highest-value first move?
- A. Accept the committee's apparent alignment and proceed with the recovery plan as endorsed
- B. Surface the conflicting private accounts as a shared, de-identified problem statement in the committee and force an explicit joint decision ✓
- C. Privately pick the account you find more credible and quietly resequence work around it
- D. Escalate above both stakeholders to a VP to have the disagreement adjudicated for you
Correct answer: B. The failure mode is a private conflict masked by public silence, so the PM's job is to make the disagreement visible and drive a joint decision rather than absorb, arbitrate secretly, or over-escalate.
A slipping program is 6 weeks behind at the 70% mark. Leadership asks you to add three senior engineers from another team to recover. Under Brooks's Law reasoning, when is adding people MOST likely to make the slip worse rather than better?
- A. When the remaining work is large, well-partitioned, and requires little context from existing engineers
- B. When the remaining work is on the critical path, tightly coupled, and requires deep onboarding from the already-busy core team ✓
- C. When the new engineers are more senior than the current team
- D. When the project uses a scaled Agile cadence with fixed PI boundaries
Correct answer: B. Added people backfire when work is late, coupled, and non-partitionable, because ramp-up and communication overhead consume the very experts whose time is the constraint.
Mid-flight, a key stakeholder requests a 'small' additional integration. Your team says it's absorbable 'if everyone pushes.' What is the correct program-management response?
- A. Accept it as absorbable since the team volunteered the effort
- B. Refuse it outright to protect the committed scope and timeline
- C. Convert it into an explicit tradeoff decision: quantify its cost and present what must move, extend, or drop to accommodate it ✓
- D. Log it as a risk and revisit at the next retrospective
Correct answer: C. Scope creep must be reframed as a visible priority/timeline/resource tradeoff owned by decision-makers, not silently absorbed on the team's goodwill nor unilaterally refused.
Your critical path depends on a platform team that just deprioritized your request; you have no authority over them. Which approach is most likely to actually unblock delivery?
- A. Have your manager formally escalate to the platform team's director as the first step
- B. Reframe the ask around the platform team's own OKRs/North Star, quantify the cross-program impact of the block, and negotiate a minimal viable slice with a date ✓
- C. Build the capability yourself in parallel to avoid the dependency entirely
- D. Add the blocked item to your risk register and wait for their next planning cycle
Correct answer: B. Influence without authority works by tying your need to their goals and shrinking the ask to a quantified, minimal commitment before escalation is warranted.
You must deliver a RED status to executives on a program you own. Which framing best preserves credibility and accountability?
- A. Lead with the mitigation work already underway so the news lands softer, then mention the slip
- B. State the slip and its business impact plainly, own the cause, and present a credible recovery plan with a decision you need from them ✓
- C. Report YELLOW with a note that it may go red, to buy time to firm up the recovery plan
- D. Attribute the slip to the specific team that missed and outline how you'll hold them accountable
Correct answer: B. Executive trust is built by naming the bad news and impact directly, owning it, and pairing it with a recovery plan and a clear decision ask, not by softening, hedging the status, or blame-shifting.
In a blameless postmortem, a junior engineer's config change triggered a major outage. How do you keep it blameless while still ensuring accountability?
- A. Focus on the human error, coach the engineer privately, and close the incident
- B. Focus on the systemic gaps (missing guardrails, review, rollback) that let one change cause an outage, and assign owned, dated action items tracked to closure ✓
- C. Keep it fully blameless by not assigning owners, so no one feels singled out
- D. Assign shared team accountability so no individual is named on any action item
Correct answer: B. Blameless means fixing the system that permitted the failure, not omitting accountability; action items must have named owners and closure tracking.
Two programs you run have conflicting OKRs and draw from the same fixed engineering capacity; an exec just raised expectations on both. What is the soundest response?
- A. Split capacity 50/50 and let each program descope to fit
- B. Make the capacity conflict and its consequences explicit to leadership, and force a ranked prioritization decision on which OKR wins under the constraint ✓
- C. Ask both teams to work overtime to protect both OKRs through the quarter
- D. Sequence the programs one after another to fully staff each in turn
Correct answer: B. With fixed capacity and conflicting goals, the PM's role is to make the tradeoff undeniable and drive an explicit leadership prioritization, not to quietly ration or absorb it through burnout.
Your lead engineer, the only person who understands a core subsystem, resigns with 3 weeks left before a hard regulatory deadline. What is the best replan under this constraint?
- A. Backfill immediately with a new hire and keep the original scope and date
- B. Protect the deadline by descoping to the regulatory-critical path, extract knowledge from the departing engineer now, and pair a successor for continuity ✓
- C. Extend the deadline, since losing the key resource makes the date impossible
- D. Have the departing engineer complete the subsystem solo before leaving to avoid handoff risk
Correct answer: B. A hard deadline plus key-person loss calls for descoping to the non-negotiable path, urgent knowledge capture, and building bus-factor redundancy, not a full-scope backfill or letting a single leaving expert own delivery.
You're prioritizing with RICE across a portfolio. One initiative has huge Reach and Impact but its Confidence is low and it has a hard cross-team dependency that RICE doesn't capture. What is the best-judgment adjustment?
- A. Trust the RICE score as computed and rank it at the top on Reach x Impact
- B. Treat the low Confidence and unmodeled dependency as a sequencing/derisking gate before committing full effort, not just a raw score input ✓
- C. Raise its Confidence estimate so the numbers reflect its strategic importance
- D. Drop it below all fully-independent initiatives regardless of its value
Correct answer: B. RICE is a starting signal; low confidence and an unmodeled hard dependency should drive a derisking/sequencing decision rather than being gamed into the score or ignored.
You're deploying a high-risk change to a high-throughput service with a tight SLO. Which rollout strategy best limits blast radius AND enables fast, clean rollback?
- A. Blue-green cutover of 100% traffic with the old environment kept warm for rollback
- B. Canary release to a small traffic percentage gated on SLO/error-budget metrics, with automated rollback if thresholds breach ✓
- C. Big-bang deploy during a low-traffic window with a manual rollback runbook
- D. Feature-flag the change on for all users but keep the old code path deployed
Correct answer: B. A metric-gated canary exposes only a small traffic slice and auto-rolls-back on SLO breach, minimizing blast radius, whereas blue-green still flips all users at once and big-bang maximizes exposure.