1 min lesson
Have one specific, defensible probe ready per domain
Use two rows in "Have one specific, defensible probe ready per domain" to state the practical decision rules.
Step 1 of 2
- Domain
- Auth
- A credible first-look question to raise
- Are tokens short-lived with rotation and is revocation fast enough for an enterprise security event?
- Domain
- Webhooks
- A credible first-look question to raise
- Is delivery at-least-once with idempotency and a DLQ or are we silently dropping events?
- Domain
- Agent backend
- A credible first-look question to raise
- Where's the backpressure when LLM load spikes and what's our per-request cost ceiling?
- Domain
- SCM
- A credible first-look question to raise
- How do we degrade when GitHub rate-limits or has a partial outage instead of cascading?
| Domain | A credible first-look question to raise |
|---|---|
| Auth | Are tokens short-lived with rotation and is revocation fast enough for an enterprise security event? |
| Webhooks | Is delivery at-least-once with idempotency and a DLQ or are we silently dropping events? |
| Agent backend | Where's the backpressure when LLM load spikes and what's our per-request cost ceiling? |
| SCM | How do we degrade when GitHub rate-limits or has a partial outage instead of cascading? |
Have one specific, defensible probe ready per domain - not a generic plan.
Resist the urge to lead with a reorg or a rewrite. A senior signal is "I'd change as little as possible in the first month - I'd map the incident history and the SLOs, then ship one reliability win to earn the right to make bigger calls." Restraint plus a concrete early deliverable reads as someone who has actually inherited a critical system before.
“First month I'd mostly listen - incident history, SLOs, where the team feels fragile. By day 60 I want one shipped reliability win in auth or webhooks, by my own hands, to earn credibility. Then I'd lock down the service contracts with product teams and start hiring to raise the bar, not the headcount.”