Principal leadership — standards that work without you

Expected question

"How do you get multiple teams to adopt an AI standard — eval gates, gateway, tenancy — without you in every design review?"

Variant forms

"Tell me about a technical standard that stuck after you moved on."
"How do you drive adoption of a control plane across product orgs?"
"What's your approach to architecture review at Principal scope?"
"How do you measure whether governance is real or performative?"

Executive summary

30-second thesis

I'd make the right path the easy path — paved road with CI gates — and make bypass expensive and timeboxed. Standards that only live in Notion die the first deadline.

2-minute answer

Adoption loop: (1) one golden path that ships faster than the bypass, (2) automated gates that fail the build, (3) office hours instead of mandatory theater reviews, (4) metrics on adoption and exception rate.

Example: side effects must call the gateway SDK — templates and examples make it the default; CI fails direct credential use. I don't win by writing a longer ADR.

What I'd refuse: architecture review as a personality cult. If every decision needs my emoji, I failed at leverage.

Measure: % of tool calls with audit, % of promotes with eval artifacts, open exceptions past expiry. If those are unknown, governance is a slide.

Skeptical follow-ups

"Teams say the paved road is too slow." Fix the road — don't delete the gate. Track time-to-compliant-ship.
"How do you handle a senior who ignores it?" Escalate with blast-radius evidence; exceptions expire; repeated bypass becomes a leveling conversation.

Staff+/Principal signal rubric

Senior: writes docs people should read.
Staff+: ships paved roads and gates.
Principal: proves adoption with metrics and succession — the standard holds when you're on PTO.