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Program Execution & Driving Without Authority1 / 2

1 min lesson

Cross-team seams are the highest-risk joints

Match each case in "Cross-team seams are the highest-risk joints" to the signal and response that fit it.

Step 1 of 2

Cross-team seams are the highest-risk jointsover-communicate here

Most migration failures don't happen inside a team's own work. They happen at the handoff, where one team's “done” doesn't match the next team's “ready.” At Cursor those seams run between Infra, ML/Research and Finance and nobody owns the gap by default.

What goes wrong at a seam

Interface assumptions diverge - units, schema, SLA expectations.

Each side assumes the other is watching the metric during cutover.

Timing mismatch: one team ramps Friday, the other is out Monday.

How you de-risk it

Write the contract down: inputs, outputs, who watches what, when.

Name a single owner for the seam, even if it's you.

Schedule the handoff inside business hours with both sides present.

Interview move

When asked to sequence a migration, lead with blast radiusHow much breaks if a change goes wrong; the scope of potential damage. Press Enter for the full definition., not speed. “I'd run it shadow → 1% canary → ramp on guardrail metrics, keeping rollback under ten minutes at every step, because at a million-plus DAU a bad cutover is a company-visible incident.” Then point at the seam: “the riskiest moment is the Infra-to-ML handoff, so I'd own that contract directly.”