For Dataeko · 90-Minute Workshop

The format, and why we think it works.

The format

90 minutes over Google Meet. Three interns. One facilitator playing the client. Two skills practised back-to-back — asking questions and writing a one-page scoping doc. Each intern leaves with a written artifact and a score.

Why these two skills, honestly

Asking and writing are the two things you can't fake in front of a client. Tools, products, frameworks — those are teachable in six weeks. But if someone asks closed leading questions or writes mush, no curriculum fixes that quickly. We want to see it now, while you still have time to decide.

The Question Drill · 10 Scenarios

One line in. The real problem under it.

Each intern draws one. They get 10 questions to find the real problem. The facilitator stays in character — only answers what is asked, only reveals the underlying issue if the right questions are asked. All scenarios sit in DevOps territory so the conversation stays in Dataeko's world.

  1. "Our releases are painful." Hidden: no artifact versioning; every release rebuilt from scratch.
  2. "Deployments take too long." Hidden: 4 GB Docker images with no layer caching.
  3. "We have a SOC 2 audit in 6 weeks and we're not ready." Hidden: no SBOM; no audit trail on who pushed which artifact.
  4. "Production keeps breaking and nobody knows why." Hidden: no promotion pipeline; dev builds reach production directly.
  5. "Our cloud bill is out of control." Hidden: stale artifacts and unused storage, not compute.
  6. "Legal asked where our open source comes from and we couldn't answer." Hidden: no proxy repo; devs pull straight from public registries.
  7. "Our DevOps guy quit and now nothing works." Hidden: tribal knowledge; pipelines undocumented; no recovery plan.
  8. "Every team does CI/CD differently and it's a mess." Hidden: no central artifact strategy; duplicated tooling per team.
  9. "Rollbacks are scary here." Hidden: no immutable versioned artifacts; rollback rebuilds from source.
  10. "Our developers say they're blocked but I don't know by what." Hidden: long build queues, no shared cache, dependency resolution slow.

Timeline · 90 minutes

What happens, minute by minute.

00:00 → 00:05 Pointers — how to ask 5 min. Open vs closed. Three layered whys. Silence as a tool. Don't suggest before hearing.
00:05 → 00:35 The question drill 30 min. Each intern in turn: 10 minutes, 10 questions, one scenario. Other two observe and silently score.
00:35 → 00:45 Question feedback 10 min. Live scoring 0–2 per question. Two strongest, two weakest, the one they should have asked.
— mid-point — Arc switch Move from talking to writing.
00:45 → 00:50 Pointers — how to write 5 min. Six sections in order: problem, current state, scope, out of scope, assumptions, open questions.
00:50 → 01:15 The doc write 25 min. Each intern writes a one-page scoping doc in a shared doc, based on what they extracted in the drill.
01:15 → 01:30 Doc feedback + wrap 15 min. Each reads aloud (~90 sec each). Peer + facilitator critique. One sentence of takeaway per intern.