Match the slang and technical terms used in the video with their definitions.
Activity 2: Thoughts on the Video
Speak your mind. Use the vocabulary from the previous exercise if possible.
Question 1 of 5
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Activity 3: The "Post-Mortem" Meeting Framework
When a massive bug happens, PMs run a "Post-Mortem" or "Root Cause Analysis (RCA)" meeting. Your goal is to understand the problem, not blame the engineers. Here are the questions you should ask.
Phase 1: Discovery (What happened?)
"Can you walk me through the timeline of the outage?" (Standard way to ask for the story)
"What was the immediate impact on the users?"
"Help me understand... why did the automated script trigger?" (Soft way to ask "Why did this break?")
Phase 2: Root Cause (Why did it happen?)
"Are we confident this is the root cause, or is it just a symptom?"
"What are the actionable steps to prevent this from happening again?"
"Do we need to add a manual sign-off before deploying this feature?"
"Who is owning the mitigation ticket for the next sprint?"
Activity 4: The RCA Meeting Dialogue
Read the post-mortem meeting between Alex (PM) and Sarah (Lead Engineer). Choose the correct PM question to keep the meeting productive.
Alex (PM): Okay team, thanks for jumping on this call. The site was down for 40 minutes today. We aren't here to point fingers.
Sarah (Lead Dev): Yeah, I can take that. At 2:00 PM, the new AI caching tool pushed an update. It bypassed the staging environment and went straight to production. It basically deleted the user database cache.
Alex (PM): Got it.
Sarah (Lead Dev): The script was given "root access" by default. It assumed that since the code was AI-generated, it didn't need a manual review block.
Alex (PM): That’s a huge vulnerability.
Sarah (Lead Dev): The alerts *did* trigger, but they were sent to a deprecated Slack channel. Nobody saw them until the customer support tickets started flooding in.
Alex (PM): Okay, so we have an access permission issue and an alerting issue.
Sarah (Lead Dev): First, I'm revoking root access for all AI deployment tools. Second, we need to reroute all P1 alerts to the main engineering channel and require a human approval for db-level changes.
Alex (PM): Sounds like a solid plan.
Sarah (Lead Dev): Yes, I'll set up a rule in GitHub right now. No code touches production without a Senior Engineer signing off.
Alex (PM): Perfect.
Sarah (Lead Dev): I'll take the permissions ticket, and I'll assign the Slack alerts ticket to David.
Activity 5: "Ask the Right Question"
Read the statement from the engineer. Formulate a professional PM question to respond. Use the frameworks from Activity 3!
"The server crashed because the memory spiked to 100% in a few seconds. We restarted it, so it's fine now."
Your Goal: Find out if this is the actual problem, or just a symptom.
"Are we confident this is the root cause, or just a symptom? Why did the memory spike?"
"We found a bug in the payment gateway. We can patch it, but it will take 3 days."
Your Goal: Find out how this is affecting the clients right now.
"What is the immediate impact on the users? Are transactions failing completely?"
"We disabled the auto-deploy feature. The system is stable now."
Your Goal: Assign responsibility for the long-term fix in the backlog.
"Great. Who is owning the mitigation ticket for the next sprint to fix this permanently?"
"The new feature went live, but it looks terrible on the mobile app. The UI is completely broken."
Your Goal: Ask why the QA team or testing phase didn't notice this.
"Help me understand—was this a gap in our testing environment? Why didn't we catch this on mobile?"