Communication

Interview Communication Phrases

🎯Starting the Interview

"Before I dive in, I'd like to ask a few clarifying questions to make sure I understand the requirements correctly."

"Let me make sure I understand the problem. We need to build [restate problem]. Is that correct?"

"What's the expected scale? How many users/requests are we expecting?"

❓Clarifying Requirements

Scale Questions

  • • "How many daily active users?"
  • • "What's our read-to-write ratio?"
  • • "How much data per user?"
  • • "What's the expected growth rate?"

Functional Questions

  • • "What are the core features we must support?"
  • • "Are there any features we can deprioritize?"
  • • "Should it be real-time or eventual consistency is OK?"
  • • "Do we need to support offline access?"

💡Proposing Solutions

"Let me start with a high-level design and then we can dive deeper into the components."

"I'm thinking of using [component] here because [reason]."

"There are a few approaches we could take here. Let me walk through the trade-offs..."

⚖️Discussing Trade-offs

"This is a classic trade-off between [X] and [Y]. Given our requirements, I'd lean towards [choice] because..."

"The downside of this approach is [limitation], but we can mitigate that by [solution]."

"We could also consider [alternative], which would give us [benefit] at the cost of [drawback]."

🆘When You're Stuck

"I'm not entirely sure about this part. Let me think through it out loud..."

"This is an area I'm less familiar with. My intuition is [guess], but I'd want to validate that."

"Can I get a hint on whether I'm on the right track with [approach]?"

Wrapping Up

✓ "To summarize, the key components of our design are..."

✓ "The main trade-off we made was choosing [X] over [Y] because..."

✓ "If we had more time, I'd want to explore [future improvement]."

✓ "Do you have any questions about the design, or areas you'd like me to dive deeper on?"

Trade-off Decision MatrixSystem Design Checklist