Microsoft

What they grade on

• Azure-service familiarity — you know when to reach for Cosmos DB vs SQL DB vs Cache
• Enterprise scenario reasoning (multi-tenant, regulated)
• Correctness before scale (Microsoft grades depth over breadth)
• Migration + backward compatibility awareness for existing product lines
• Communication cadence — explaining decisions to non-technical stakeholders

Deal breakers

• Consumer-only framing — forgetting the enterprise buyer completely
• Ignoring tenant isolation in a multi-tenant scenario
• Reaching for AWS services when Azure equivalents exist
• No thought for compliance (SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA, FedRAMP) in enterprise design

Super helpful signals

• Naming a specific Azure service and its published limits (e.g., Cosmos RU/s throttling)
• Discussing tenant isolation strategy explicitly (shared DB + tenant_id vs per-tenant DB)
• Referencing an internal Microsoft paper (e.g., Cosmos DB, Service Fabric)
• Backward-compat migration story that respects existing customer contracts

Delivery advice

• Think enterprise-first: multi-tenant, compliance, isolation.
• Cite specific Azure services and their limits (Cosmos DB RUs, Service Bus limits, App Service instances).
• Discuss backward compatibility for anything replacing an existing product.
• Reason about hybrid cloud + on-prem for regulated customers (banks, government).
• Talk about global rollout — availability zones + region pairs.

Red flags to avoid

• Consumer-only framing
• Ignoring tenant isolation
• AWS-first reasoning when Azure equivalents exist
• No compliance angle for enterprise problems