John demonstrated senior-level ownership and breadth. He framed the project with recency, team context, and product vision; partnered effectively across use-case and tooling teams; and presented an evolving technical approach backed by clear prioritization. The scope, impact, and leadership signals align with Senior SDE expectations (potentially higher).
Strengths
- Strong opening: Clear intros, recent context, team name and vision.
- Business alignment: Storage/tooling context mapped to top priorities.
- Appropriate scope: 5-dev team (including you) with crisp role delineation.
- Technical clarity: Well-structured diagram; original → improved approach evolution.
- Collaboration: Effective cross-team partnerships across use cases and tooling.
- Prioritization depth: Stated challenges and articulated decision rules clearly.
- Breadth without rabbit holes: Left room for interviewer-driven deep dives.
- Leadership signal: Clear lead-engineer responsibilities and measurable impact, including cost savings.
Areas to Improve
- Slide flow & story arc: Re-organize into:
- Problem (user stories, pain points, goal)
- Requirements with metrics
- Options & decision trade-offs
- System architecture
- Challenges (invite deep dives)
- Impact & learnings
- Conciseness: Target ~10 slides (current ~12) and reduce dense text.
- Team roles: Briefly call out others’ responsibilities to spotlight your leadership.
- Explicit goal: You have a problem statement—add a one-line success goal.
- Planning & sequencing: Describe your planning contributions and how you handled non-sequential, parallelized work.
- Timeline clarity: 15 months across 5 devs—translate to engineering months/weeks when helpful.
- Strategic framing before design: State the strategy and alternative solutions you considered before presenting the chosen design.
- Diagram titling & mapping: Add slide titles (e.g., “Proposal,” “Final Architecture”) and highlight which diagram regions correspond to each proposal element.
- Early alignment: Upfront “feature checklist” (e.g., self-serve configuration) to align expectations and show value.
- Challenge signposting: Label explicitly (e.g., “Challenge 1: Async load generation,” “Challenge 2: Data generation & tracking”) to keep the audience oriented.
- Core technical depth: Surface 2–3 hard technical problems that best demonstrate your senior expertise and how you solved them.
- Success metrics: Pair each requirement with a measurable KPI (e.g., false-positive rate, throughput, SLOs) and note how you tracked it.
Suggested Next Steps
- Re-cut the deck to 10 slides using the flow above; trim text to headlines + visual aids.
- Add a role slide (RACI-style bullets) to highlight your leadership + others' responsibility.
- Insert an “Options vs Decision” slide with a quick pros/cons table and rationale.
- Create a “Challenges & Deep Dives” slide listing a real technical challenge you’re ready to tackle.
- Attach metrics to requirements (e.g., FP/FN targets, p95 latency, cost per X) and show how you measured them and defined your project success ahead of time.